


like a carcass left out in the heat, this love is bursting out of me

by getmean



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Dream Magic, M/M, Obsession, Reality Bending, Southern Gothic, Trans Male Character, Witches, dream sex yes i said it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:48:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 50,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25549978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getmean/pseuds/getmean
Summary: He’s already recognising a strange duality in the town. It’s something difficult to pinpoint, so abstract and intangible that Eugene almost wants to pull his notebook from his pocket and map it. It feels like those cartoon strips in the Sunday paper,Spot The Difference!Something always subtly out of place. The kettle has spots in image two. The dog is smiling, the woman is now a man.
Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Comments: 12
Kudos: 23
Collections: Sledgefu Week 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> my submission for day two of sledgefu week, southern gothic au! there is a trigger warning here for self-injury: i'll put the warning in more detail in the end notes for those who don't wanna be spoiled, but also in case you wanna check it out to deem whether it's triggering to you or not!

It’s a boiling hot Sunday, when Eugene arrives in Louisiana. 

He comes in on an overnight from Montgomery; arrives groggy and motion-weary on the nine oh four to a small town he can’t remember the name of. It’s a passing place, the only train station around for miles, and Eugene is sure it must only receive one train a day. He’s the only person to disembark, and walks headlong into a wall of heat the second that he does. The air is choked with the smell of hot dirt and honeysuckle, the smell so rich and perfumed that it’s almost too much. It’s the kind of humid, thick heat that seems unique to these tiny, backwoods parts of America. The air is still, and gritty; Eugene can feel the strong sun beating down on the crown of his head as he takes a moment to stretch, to look around. 

In the parking lot, a red truck idles. Eugene makes a beeline for it. 

The driver is a man about Eugene’s age; blond with a broad, freckled face, a skinny roll-up sat smoking between his lips. The truck windows are down, but Eugene still stands a foot away, unsure. His t-shirt is already sticking to his back with sweat. The A/C of the train car had been cold to the point of being too-cold. It means this sudden dunk into the soupy heat of Louisiana is hitting him all at once.

“I’m going to Ambrose,” he says, and the man braces his wrists to the steering wheel, peers at him curiously.

“Eugene Sledge,” the man says. It’s not a question. Eugene nods nervously, anyway. The man nods too, and leans across the cab to open the door. “Get on in, then.”

The car ride is silent, save for the radio, dipping in and out of static as they drive fast down an empty highway, fields on all sides. Every so often, music will surface from the static, twangy country rock, only to be buried once more. Eugene keeps glancing between the radio and the driver, wondering why he just doesn’t adjust the dial. The static is fuzzing deep into his brain, compounding the headache that the heat is giving him. The inside of the cab is dusty, and hot. Mardi Gras beads rattle from the rearview. In the truck bed, a rangy old dog keeps a low profile.

“So, how long have you lived in Ambrose?” Eugene asks, in some vague attempt to break the silence. He’s the sort of person who finds silence with a stranger awkward. The man doesn’t seem to have any such concerns. He just laughs, and sucks on the end of his cigarette. One callused hand on his thigh, the other just barely touching the steering wheel. 

“My whole life,” he says. With his free hand, he tugs on the baseball cap keeping the sun from his blue eyes. “Nobody moves outta Ambrose.” 

“Oh,” Eugene replies, lost for words. “Well, how ‘bout people movin’ in?” He tries to keep his voice light. The man shoots him a sidelong look.

“Not many people makin’ a habit of that, either,” he says, and silence falls between them once more. 

Eugene rests his head on his hand, elbow propped to the open window so that the hot wind whips at his face, at his hair. His sunglasses keep the grit from his eyes as he watches the state roll by; fields melting into densely wooded forests as they turn off from the main highway, which in turn melt into tiny towns. One-road towns; ghostly and empty as they drive through. Crumbling houses and abandoned farms. Then they give way to trees which hang over the road like a lush green corridor, and the air changes, so subtly that Eugene thinks he may be imagining it. Something brown and organic joins the mix of heat-baked earth and greenery, but then the tunnel of trees opens up and the road is surrounded by water on both sides, and Eugene knows they’ve hit the bayou. 

The early morning sunlight glances off the top of the water, and then they’re plunged back into the green darkness of the tunnel once more, and the man at the wheel says, “Almost there, now.”

Eugene wonders if it’s too late to ask his name. 

The town itself is small; so small you could blink and you’d miss it. Tucked away at the foot of a dirt-track road, one that Eugene and the unnamed driver bump down for a good fifteen minutes before any sign of civilisation begins to show itself. 

The first thing Eugene sees is the sign. Peeling in the southern sun, it may have once been a cheerful daffodil yellow, but has since faded to an unappetising straw-like colour. _Welcome to Ambrose_ sweats in black paint, its tagline underneath peeled far enough away that Eugene knows he’ll be hiking back up to the sign later to take a real look at it. His eyes feel like they’re on stalks, trying to see everything as they drive through the middle of town. 

Everything seems gathered on one block, though Eugene knows houses must lie beyond it, winding neighbourhoods in the trees. The sidewalks are quiet, the heat shimmering off them as they drive on by. The morning sun turns the shop windows into mirrors, leaving Eugene none the wiser at what lies in wait for him. There’s a bakery, he spots that. A post office, a general store. A handful of two-up-two-downs, the white spire of a church rising above it all. They pass by in less than a minute. Eugene hasn’t seen a single person yet.

“Where is everyone?” he asks, and the man looks at him like he’s stupid.

“Church,” he says, mouth pursed as if there’s a cigarette in there, despite the fact that he’d crushed it out in the car ashtray twenty minutes ago. “You ain’t religious?” he asks, and the way his jaw is set lets Eugene know that there’s a right answer and a wrong one.

“I grew up Baptist,” he says, determined not to lie. It seems to be enough, because the man turns back to the road, and a second later they’re pulling up outside a squat, off-white shotgun, set back from the road. It’s shadowed by a large southern live oak, its limbs sweeping low over the roof of the house, like it’s so heavy it can’t hold itself up all the way. Drunken. The windows are black, sightless eyes, mirroring the sun back at them. 

“This is you,” the man says, and hops down from the cab of the truck. Eugene follows him, grabbing at his bags and pushing the door shut with his elbow. They round the truck, the old dog watching them disinterestedly from the bed. 

“Hot water, electric, the works,” the man continues, pulling a pouch of tobacco from the back pocket of his jeans as they linger at the edge of the property. “Wife put a desk in there for you, too.” He glances at the typewriter in Eugene’s hand, safe inside its travel case. “General store in town; can sell you paper, and everythin’ else.”

They’re a good half-mile from town, Eugene thinks, turning around to squint up the road they had just come down. Which is good, less distractions. He glances down the road, running off into the woods beyond the shotgun. “What’s down there?” he asks, and the man shrugs, eyes on the cigarette he’s rolling.

“Woods,” he says, and there’s something in his voice that makes that curious side of Eugene perk up. “If you go far enough, the bayou. I wouldn’t go down there, save you gettin’ lost.” Here, he grins, and Eugene blinks, surprised at how the gesture transforms his face into something open, and friendly.

He presses a ring of keys into Eugene’s hand. Points them out one by one. “Front door, screen door, back door.” He ducks his head to light his cigarette, and then hovers his finger back over the keys in Eugene’s palm. “Shed, safe, gate.”

“You sure keep a lot locked up,” Eugene mumbles, closing his fist and letting the keys hang from his index finger. He rattles them. The man is smiling again, and Eugene marvels once more at the transformative power of it. 

“What, you got nothin’ to steal?” he asks, and Eugene feels a strange sort of chill run through him as he meets the man’s eyes. The easy beauty of their surroundings suddenly seems brittle. False. Like a flimsy veneer. The man’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes.

But then Eugene blinks, and everything is the same as it had been when he’d first gotten out of the car. The air hot, and golden, thick with the sounds of insects and birds. He takes a humid lungful of it, and rubs his hand over his face. “I’m exhausted,” he mutters, and glances towards the house. “Anythin’ open in town on Sundays?” he asks. 

The man shrugs, exhaling smoke as he glances back up the way they came. “Hell, if you ask nice enough anybody’d open up for you.” He rattles his car keys as he takes a step back, the dog perking up in the bed of the truck as he nears it. “The wife and I run the general store. Drop on by if you like, but we stocked the cupboards a little for you.” That smile again. “Can’t be writin’ on an empty stomach, huh?”

Eugene is left lingering in the sunlight, eyes squinted against the dust the truck had kicked up as it drove away. It hangs in the still air, like a golden veil. A cicada wails into the silence. Eugene turns to make his way to the front door of what will be home for him for the next few months. 

It’s his career that brings him here. According to his agent, a change in environment can sometimes help kickstart the creative process. And she better be right, because Eugene is digging himself into the backwoods of Louisiana in a desperate attempt to finish the first draft of his novel. It’s been languishing in notebooks, on scrap paper, in the back of his mind for months — somewhere close to a year, by now. His agent had finally put a polite foot down two weeks ago. Eugene had started planning this writing retreat not an hour after their meeting. 

He’d landed on Ambrose by pure chance. If he hadn’t been flicking through the newspaper while he fielded questions from his roommate about rent, he would still be living in complete ignorance about the town. He’d paused to say something, and his eyes had landed on a tiny ad, tucked away between a huge auto-repair ad and a coupon for a free oil change. _Mystic_ , it had said, below a drawing of an unblinking, thickly-lashed eye. _Ambrose, LA, invites you to uncover the secrets of your dreams_ was emblazoned below it. Eugene had been hooked by it. He’d even clipped it out of the paper, just for reference.

One week and one train ride later, he’s here. Slotting the key for the screen door into the lock, and turning. He’d agreed to rent the place unseen, thinking that it added to the whole podunk mystique that Ambrose had held for him. Now, as Eugene fights with the finicky lock, he wonders if it was very wise. 

The screen door comes open, and then the front door too. Eugene stands for a second on the threshold, peering into the room beyond. The cicadas have gone quiet again. The back of his neck prickles, like ants are crawling up his skin.

He steps into the room.

It’s a pretty ordinary shotgun. A wide, open plan kitchen-sitting area, narrowing to a small hallway that Eugene assumes lets out into the bedroom, the bathroom. Small, neat, and spartan. Dark wood floors and white-washed walls, and inoffensive collection of floral prints cluttering the space above the faded yellow sofa. A coffee table, no TV. No radio. A handsome brass ashtray sits pride of place next to — Eugene steps closer, curious — a phonebook? He glances around. No phone. 

The cupboards are stocked with a loaf of bread, a box of pasta, a carton of eggs. The fridge is similarly basic, save for a six pack of beer that Eugene raises his eyebrows at. Suddenly ravenous, Eugene opens up the loaf of bread and eats a piece like that, wandering through the hallway towards the back of the house as he chews. 

The desk the man had mentioned is in the bedroom. Eugene pulls a face at it, but the house is hot enough as it is, and he can’t face trying to manoeuvre it into the main room. His typewriter gets unpacked first; his duffle slung onto the bed to pick through as needs arise. Eugene slips a sheet of paper into the typewriter, and presses a few keys, making sure it hadn’t gotten knocked around by the trip. Satisfied it works, he leaves it, and wanders through to the front of the house for another slice of bread.

“Normal,” he says to himself, standing in the middle of the room, looking around. “All completely normal.”

Eugene doesn’t know why he keeps expecting it not to be. Again, that prickling feeling on the back of his neck. When he peers out of the windows, dense dark forest peers back. He can’t shake the feeling of being watched. 

He spends the remainder of the morning shuffling around the house, exploring all the cupboards and closets and unpacking his things. The house is oddly silent, which he knows he’ll appreciate later when he gets to writing, but for now it just feels eerie. Eugene wishes he’d brought a portable radio with him, just for some background chatter. Ambrose is silent like the grave. It doesn’t occur to Eugene that he hasn’t heard a bird sing or a bug trill since that man had left in that cloud of dust. Uneasily, Eugene thinks again of that moment where he felt like he had shifted aside some flimsy veil to uncover what lay beneath. The shattered yellow sunlight, the sudden hush. 

It’s hot. Eugene drinks a glass of water, and then another, and falls asleep on the sofa without really meaning to. Midday slips by. When he wakes, the sun has shifted, throwing rich light through the windows into the previously-dim room. Eugene lays there and watches motes of dust catch the light for a while, warming to the room, feeling himself drifting in that space between sleep and true wakefulness. A bird is singing sweetly beyond the window, and Eugene scrubs at his face as he listens to it, stretching with a groan as his muscles ache from being curled up on an unfamiliar sofa. He’d dreamed of something, something too vague to remember properly, but impactful enough to leave him feeling thoughtful. _The shed skin of a cicada_ , he thinks, nonsensically. _I remember a house —_

His stomach growls. 

“Okay, okay,” Eugene mutters to himself, and heaves himself up to go eat, change, and head into town. The dream that he’d been just millimetres from sinks back into the depths of his subconscious, nothing to show for it but a slight unease when he leaves the house, and puts the forest to his back.

The heat feels worse than it had that morning, or maybe it’s from falling asleep and overheating on the sofa, Eugene doesn’t know. Either way, he’s sweating by the time he hits the main street of Ambrose; the air hot and heavy and weighing him down. Like moving through a giant vat of golden syrup, making him feel slow and stupid. 

It doesn’t help that it’s all uphill from the shotgun he’s renting for the duration. Eugene huffs at himself, plucking at the front of his t-shirt as he crests the top of the slope. Just his luck. Still, it adds to the remoteness. Maybe it’ll keep him from avoiding writing by walking into town everyday, if this is how much it sucks. 

Wandering through Ambrose on foot makes the town seem bigger than it had in the passenger seat of the truck. What had looked run-down from afar is nothing more than comfortable and weathered up close. The town wears its patina well; Eugene begins to feel more enthralled by the place the more of it he sees. The little green plants pushing up through the cracked sidewalks, painted signs peeling and cracking in the strong southern sun. It beats down on the pavements, hot enough that Eugene can feel it through the thin soles of his sneakers as he passes a drugstore, a post office, a bar. All three buildings look interchangeable; the faces made up in white-painted wood, bubbling and cracking in the sun. The sign that swings over the bar bears a wolf’s head, red tongue lolling from its toothy mouth. 

Eugene ducks into the drugstore to buy a pack of smokes, and tries to ignore the eyes of the locals on his back. The cashier is a teenage girl, snapping chewing gum in her mouth as she stoops to rifle for his cigarettes in the display behind her. Eugene watches her, wondering what it must be like to grow up in a tiny, sleepy place like this. He almost asks her, but something in the set of her jaw stops him. He’s always been afraid of teenagers, even when he was one. 

He pays, and then leaves, back out into the heat of the day. The streets are busier now, though ‘busy’ may not be the right word for it. A couple elderly people make a glacial show of crossing the road; from faraway Eugene hears the chatter of children, the shrill shriek of a baby. It makes him wonder whether he’ll know everyone by sight by the end of his time here. It makes him wonder if they’re all watching him, wondering who this new stranger is in their midst. 

Ever since he was a kid, he’s had a fascination with small towns. That insular, unfriendly atmosphere they all seem to hold has always drawn him in. He likes watching them from afar; seeing them from the role of an outsider. The half-formed ideas and scrap thoughts for the novel that’s been itching the back of his brain for months are centred around a small, southern town. It seems fitting to draw it out onto the page while staying in one. And Ambrose is so far not disappointing in its weird small town energy; Eugene sees at least a dozen heads all turn to stare at him when he sets foot into the general store, the bell ringing over his head. It’s almost enough to make him turn back around. He’s tired, he’s hot, he still feels like he has one foot in that strange, half-remembered dream of his. 

He’s already recognising a strange duality in Ambrose. It’s something difficult to pinpoint, so abstract and intangible that Eugene almost wants to pull his notebook from his pocket and map it. It feels like those cartoon strips in the Sunday paper, _Spot The Difference!_ Something always subtly out of place. The kettle has spots in image two. The dog is smiling, the woman is now a man.

The faces of all the people in the store are hard, and unwelcoming. Suspicious and wary. But then Eugene blinks. Image two. An old man nods at him, a baby raises its fat little fist and opens and closes its fingers. From the other side of the store, the man who had picked Eugene up from the train station waves, and calls, “Didn’t expect you to make it today!”

Eugene steps forward into the store, committing fully to the weirdness. 

“Why not?” he asks, as he approaches the counter that the man is standing behind. “Beer and bread is hardly enough to keep me goin’.”

The man’s eyes crinkle with his smile. “Well, you looked wiped out,” he says. “How’s the place?”

“Perfect,” Eugene says. “Couldn’t ask for more.” He takes a quick glance around the store. It’s a small building, and just as well-worn into the fabric of the town as everywhere else seems to be. Wood-panelled walls, low ceilings. Pretty well stocked, though Eugene can’t spot liquor anywhere. “Hey,” he says, absently. “I didn’t ever catch your name.”

“Huh,” the man says, and when Eugene glances back his way, he’s frowning. “Burgin,” he says, and then, “Call me Burgie. Everyone else does.”

“Sure,” Eugene says, and reaches his hand across the counter to shake Burgie’s. “Better late than never, huh?”

Burgie’s grip is strong as he shakes Eugene’s hand, something playful in his eye as he shrugs, and says, “I guess you’re right.”

Again, that doubling. Image one. Image two. The fine veneer that Eugene had sensed that mornings shifts again as Eugene realises how cold and clammy Burgie’s hand is in his own. They part. Eugene curls his hand into a fist. The store is warm, bordering on muggy; the sunlight coming in through the cloudy front windows making it feel almost like a greenhouse inside. The smell of cardboard boxes, of overripe fruit, the smell of a fan working hard and burning itself out. No excuse for a man’s hand to be cold.

“You need help findin’ anything?” Burgie asks, the picture of politeness. Slowly, Eugene shakes his head, and casts his eye over the store. It’s cleared out significantly since he’d first stepped inside. Eugene’s hand itches for the notebook in his back pocket. 

He gets a chance to go to it on his walk back down the hill, paper shopping bag tucked in the crook of his arm as he dawdles. He’s never been good at note-taking on the go. _Mannequins,_ he writes. _Call it lack of sleep, but this place is full of mannequins._ It’s a half joke; something for him to look back on in a few months and laugh about. He loves these quirks in personality, loves to figure out what makes some people weird and some people normal. Loves to think about the kind of collective personality a small town can foster. The cold politeness. The overwrought southern charm. He’s smiling to himself even as he scribbles a little more down. Inside the bag, the glass bottle of milk is blessedly cool against his chest. He’d bought a pint of ice cream too. Brain food. He needs to get it home before it melts into sticky nothingness over everything else in the bag.

The trees murmur when Eugene nudges the front gate open to start up the path to the front door, juggling the paper bag and his notebook and that ridiculous bunch of keys as he goes. Murmuring louder and louder until Eugene looks up in alarm, expecting to see the drunken oak next to the house being tossed by the wind. 

It’s not moving. Image one. Eugene loses his grip on the paper bag of groceries as pure surprise makes him relax his arms, and as the bag hits the ground the rustling noise stops. Cuts out like a speaker having its plug pulled from the socket. 

Image two. The shattered milk bottle, its contents spreading and sinking into the gravel path. In the silence that follows, a bird trills, high and reedy and carrying over the dark woods.

—————

As Eugene begins to settle into life in Ambrose, he begins to notice just how much he’s dreaming.

The first week or so, he played it off as an overactive mind; up late writing the novel draft that’s finally letting itself be known to him, mind overrun with ideas. Of course it’d spill over into his sleep too. He dreams of character details, plot points, and starts keeping a notepad near the bed to empty his mind onto when he wakes up in the mornings. He doesn’t pay it any notice at all. Eugene’s so wrapped up in the pleasure of finally weaving all those ideas into a semi-cohesive tapestry that his vivid dreaming flies directly under the radar.

It’s around week two that he realises, and it’s like once he’s noticed it, he can’t stop. Dreams about home, dreams about his parents, all so boring and ordinary that he can’t even call his excessive dreaming the strangest thing that’s happening to him. No, that honour belongs to just the simple state of being in Ambrose, though maybe the dreaming is just an offshoot from the greater oddity that is the town. 

“Do you have a lot of weird dreams?” he asks, thumbing through his wallet for change as Burgie bags his groceries. Burgie hums.

“Define weird.”

Eugene extracts a quarter, and places it on the stack of bills that Burgie scoops up, and starts to count. “Vivid,” he says, and takes the bag from the counter. 

“Well, are they vivid, or weird?” Burgie asks, absently, like the two aren’t practically synonymous. Eugene tells Burgie as much, which makes him laugh, slamming the register shut.

“I don’t think havin’ a dream ‘bout my childhood house is weird,” he says, and pulls his baseball cap off, wipes the back of his hand over his forehead. The store’s hot today; just like every other day. “But it sure gets vivid. Shit, I don’t think my momma even knew the dirt that was under that fridge.” He huffs, and then nods to someone as the bell over the door tinkles.

“So you do get vivid dreams,” Eugene says, and Burgie shrugs. His expression shutters. Over the hum of the fans, the radio plays Patsy Cline, the sound warping and bending in the close, still air. Eugene’s been trying to coin a phrase for these pockets of otherness in an otherwise normal day. The ‘spot the difference’ thing is too wordy. 

“Doesn’t everyone?” Burgie asks, and someone clears their throat behind Eugene, who jumps. The real world clicks back into place. Burgie’s expression is curious, and open. The man behind Eugene clears his throat again, and then coughs. 

_A manipulation_ , Eugene tests, as he bids Burgie goodbye and turns to leave the store. No, that’s not quite right. Suggests a certain level of deliberateness to it. _Your own poor social skills_ , he thinks, sourly, as he steps back out into the heavy heat of the afternoon. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s his own brain twisting things. The temperature doesn’t help. Eugene’s brain has been feeling on the verge of over easy at all times since he’d arrived into that wall of heat at the train station, just over a month ago.

Still, he’s writing. That’s the important part.

In fact, the writing is the easy part. He’s so into the flow of the story that it almost feels like his hands are on autopilot, moving over the keys of his typewriter. Sometimes he doesn’t move from his seat at the desk all afternoon; emerges dazed and wall-eyed to fetch a glass of water and something quick from the fridge to eat, before diving back in. His back aches from the chair. His wrists ache from holding them over the keys. But behind his eyes he’s wired, full to the brim with a story that’s finally aching to be let out. 

He imagines someone approaching the house he’s staying in, seeing the dark windows of the front where he rarely spends much time, hearing the clattering of his typing. The people in town must think he’s mad. Ink-stained fingers from the note-making he does over dinner, his hair wild from the humidity. It’s funny, to be regarded as mad by such a deeply strange community; though Eugene is beginning to accept that it might be all in his head after all. Alone time always makes his brain tick over in new and exciting ways. Add to that the heat, the way he’s wringing his brain out over his typewriter every day, and it makes sense that when he emerges he can’t know strange from normal. Can’t know hostility from simple neutrality. Sometimes he spends so much time writing about human beings interacting that he can’t quite wrap his head around it when it comes to the real world.

So, it’s all easily explained away. Normal, perfectly normal.

June melts into July, and even Burgie starts mopping his forehead and declaring it ‘hotter than hell’, so Eugene knows it’s not just him. At home he sits from the blinds half-drawn and a cheap standing fan he’d found in the closet turned on him, full power. He wakes soaked with sweat in the mornings, nude in the bed with his sheets on the floor, head stuffed full of cotton. The vivid dreams continue. Sometimes, Burgie drops by with a dish of food his wife has obviously forced him to deliver. Sometimes, Eugene manages to disconnect himself from his typewriter long enough to take the half-mile walk into town, head bowed against the sun. He clings to the edge of the road and the lacy shadows thrown by the trees that border it, cigarette smoke marking a trail behind him. 

In the heat, the town begins to feel almost like an organic thing. A creature; breathing and sweating and pulsing in the hazy air. Ambrose is choked with dust, with honeysuckle, with soupy hot air and mosquitoes. Everything is so analogous that it feels grown, created. Sprouted, like the town and all its inhabitants have sprung up from the ground and left to fester in the heat. Eugene wanders through it with his head in the clouds, sweat slick on his underarms and on his chest, his back. The forest that surrounds his house looks cooler and more inviting day by day. Dark and lush and watchful. Eugene dreams of eyes blinking sharp and green from the shadowy pockets that lie between the trees, dreams of the smell of peat and ozone.

Burgie brings him casserole early in the week, and accepts Eugene’s offer of a cup of coffee as he puts the food away. The dog hops down from the bed of the truck when Burgie whistles for it, and together they sit out the front on the steps that lead to the porch. It’s early enough in the morning that the front of the house is shady, and marginally cooler than being inside or standing in the sun. Burgie’s pink all over, like he’s been doing yard work. Eugene leans his shoulder against the railings on the steps, and watches as Burgie’s hand dips into his breast pocket for his pouch of tobacco. A bird sings into the quiet between them; lazily, the dog lifts its head and peers off into the woods. 

“How’s the writin’ goin’?” Burgie asks, as he always does. They’ve grown far friendlier than Eugene thought they would in the beginning, and he’s grateful for it. Burgie seems like a still centre of normalcy in the middle of all the strangeness, despite his own propensity for dodging questions. 

“Good,” Eugene says, and taps his pack of smokes against his palm. Next to him, Burgie shuffles a pinch of tobacco into a smooth tube in the paper, and rolls it. Eugene nudges him. “Can I try one?”

Burgie glances at him, expression appraising. “Sure,” he says, easily, and hands Eugene the cigarette he was about to light himself. “You ain’t ever smoked a roll-up?” 

Eugene ducks his head over his lighter, and makes a noise. “Nah, I wouldn’t know where to start.” He puffs on the cigarette, drawing the flame in. “I’m a man of convenience,” he adds, and laughs when Burgie chuckles, and shakes his head.

“I got sick of Luckies,” Burgie mutters, “and then they turned me off pre-rolled altogether.” He glances sidelong at Eugene, catches his curious expression, and the corner of his mouth lifts. “I was in Vietnam. They were in our rations.” He pauses to lick the paper of the new cigarette he’d rolled. “S’pose you came clear of that.”

“I was in university,” Eugene says, quietly, and Burgie hums. Smoke fogs the air. The roll-up is making Eugene feel lightheaded. “Is it always so hot here?” he blurts, mostly to break the silence that’s fallen between them. He’s sensitive to the fact that he managed to dodge the war in its entirely; always assuming that people are looking down their nose at him in various ways. 

Eugene is expecting Burgie to laugh at him for the question, so when he doesn’t Eugene frowns, and glances to him. Burgie is impassive in profile, his fingers scratching idly at the dog’s head as he stares off across the road. “Hmm,” he says, finally. “No, not this bad.”

Curiosity piqued, Eugene makes a questioning noise. “Oh, yeah?” 

Burgie shrugs his shoulders, and then his eyes slide to meet Eugene’s. Shadowed under the fraying brim of his omnipresent baseball cap, cold like little chips of blue ice. Eugene swallows. Burgie tips his head to the side thoughtfully, lets the sunlight thaw his eyes, and says, “Lots has changed ‘round here.”

It’s the kind of leading statement that Eugene would immediately latch onto and try to get to the bottom of, if this was any other place. But there’s something in Burgie’s tone that doesn’t invite questions; something in the way he turns away and re-lights his cigarette, like the topic has been abandoned. Still, what a strange way to answer a simple question. The follow-up is crawling out of Eugene’s mouth before he can catch it.

“Like what?”

The forest is silent today. The bird has stopped singing. Eugene hears the rasp of the cigarette paper, the clink of the dog’s collar as he rolls over onto his side with a huff. Slowly, Burgie says, “You’ll think it’s all wives’ tales.” 

Inside, laid out next to Eugene’s typewriter, are pages and pages of a story that boils down to wives’ tales. Dryly, he says, “I think I’ll be fine.”

Burgie drinks some of his coffee. Smokes his cigarette right down to the very last ends of it, and then casts around for an ashtray. Eugene hands him the brass one he’d taken from inside; the metal hot to the touch from sitting out in the day. “There’s a witch,” he says, so matter-of-factly that Eugene’s first reaction is to laugh. 

He regrets it immediately, slaps a hand over his mouth to cover the shocked smile still lingering. “I’m sorry,” he mutters, when Burgie rolls his eyes and glances away. “Sorry, it’s just —” Burgie doesn’t look the sort of man who believes in the supernatural. He looks like a man who believes in the land, in the things you can hold with two hands and examine in the light. 

“I did warn you,” Burgie says. His eyes are on his hands. “Don’t matter if you believe or not. You feel it, you see it. This place ain’t quite right, and it’s his doin’.”

“His?” Eugene picks up on, curiously. “You’ve seen him?”

Burgie clears his throat, and then stands, the dog hopping up as well. “I haven’t,” he mutters, and tugs his cap off to wipe the sweat from his brow. His eyes scan the forest, and then turn to Eugene’s upturned face. “But I’d know him if I saw him.” His hand comes up, smears over his own face. “You’d know.”

 _How do you know that? Has anyone ever seen him?_ The questions are racking up behind each other in Eugene’s head faster than he can even think about saying them. But he holds back, for reasons beyond the fact that Burgie is beating a fast retreat down to the front gate, to his truck beyond. It’s the same reason why he had hesitated on asking the question that had slipped out earlier; Burgie’s tone, his flint-hard eyes, the general air of avoidance. Like he’d already said too much. Like someone could be listening in.

“Clearin’ off quick for a wives’ tale!” Eugene calls after Burgie, just because he can’t help it. From the seat of his truck, Burgie flaps his hand out of the window.

“Gotta open up the shop,” he retorts, as the truck comes to life. The dog is sat in the passenger seat, watching Eugene. “Catch you around.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Eugene mutters, and re-lights the roll-up he’d left to go out while they were talking. It tastes bad on the second lighting; that ashy taste, so Eugene stubs it out and lights one of his own. Burgie’s truck had kicked up a cloud of dust that now hangs heavy in the still air, reminding Eugene so much of his first day in Ambrose that he almost expects something weird to happen. The rustling of trees on a still day. The bark of a dog that he never sees. The more Eugene mulls it over, the more he feels inclined towards Burgie’s superstition. Hell, he’s a writer — Eugene likes to think he’s in touch with the idea of reality being not quite what it seems. After all, he has a book steadily coming together, in which a great beast stalks the citizens of a small Appalachian town. He gets it. He can get with witches.

In practise, anyway. At his core, Eugene’s the son of a doctor with an undergrad degree in biology. It’s unfortunate. The trees moving on a still day can be pinned on the air currents up high; the mystery dog barking — well. There’s miles and miles of forest and swamp to three of the four sides of the house that Eugene’s staying. It isn’t impossible to believe there’d be a dog or two out there; or at least not any more impossible than a witch.

Still, try as he might, Eugene can’t get the thought out of his head. 

It distracts him from writing. It distracts him from not-writing. He thinks about it while he’s cooking, while he’s in the shower, while he’s hugging the side of the road on one of this daily walks into town. It’s hard to tell what it is that actually is capturing his mind so much; Burgie hadn’t told him much, but maybe that’s the problem. He’d left so much open for Eugene to fill with his overactive imagination that it’s frustrating him. He wants to be able to hold his version of the story up to the truth to find out where the parts overlap. 

The truth. Or whatever story is the accepted truth. Eugene has been torn between the two sides of himself since that hot morning with Burgie on the porch. He thinks it’s the not-knowing that irks him, that’s making him so curious. That, or the fact that Burgie won’t even acknowledge that he’d told Eugene about it in the first place.

So, he goes to the only people he can think of whose ability to gossip matches his own curiosity. 

Ambrose may be small, but what it lacks in sheer number of people it more than makes up for in character. And Eugene, ever since he arrived, has been a particular favourite of a good handful of Ambrose’s more colourful characters. Old women love him. It’s no secret, nothing magic. He’s simply young, a good listener, and well-groomed. It’s enough, when those three qualities make him stick out of the crowd in Ambrose. 

Before now his popularity with the old women had been a little bothersome. They always managed to frequent various places in town at the same time as him, without fail. It made a twenty minute trip for cigarettes into an hour-long one, after Sylvia or Mary or Brenda managed to catch him into a long-winded conversation. Sometimes, he’d be strong-armed into carrying their groceries home. Most of the time, he was an ear to listen to all their winding tales about their day, their dead husbands, or about the rising price of lamb. But Eugene’s mom had raised him right, so he stood and nodded and listened to stories about their grandsons, and now it’s all coming in handy.

It takes a sly, “I heard a rumour this place is haunted,” with most of them. A little bit of a more direct, “I came here ‘cos I heard there’s a witch,” with others. All Eugene has to do in the fallout is sit back and take enough mental notes to scratch that itch of curiosity in him. They tell him tales of a house on the banks of the swamp, a three mile march through the thick woods which bristle on the edge of Eugene’s vision at all times. Tales of a wicked, grotesque creature who lives there; ancient, sexless, white eyes in a rotting face. Witch only in name, because witch is far too close to human for what this thing is. 

Sylvia tells Eugene she’d seen it, back in the twenties when she was a young woman. “I was walkin’ home from a girlfriend’s house,” she says, gnarled old fingers grasping at the bulbous head of her cane. It’s shaped like a goose, and her fingernails trace the engraved feathers on the neck as she adds, “Loomin’ outta the bushes on Magnolia. I didn’t go down that street for years after.”

“So you believe in it?” Eugene asks, eagerly. He has a particular love for folk tales. This whole hunt is becoming more enjoyable the more he learns. “You don’t think it’s just a story?”

“We ain’t had a summer this hot since ’67,” she says. “Ten years.” She eyes him, surprisingly fierce behind her coke-bottle glasses. “You don’t think that’s funny?”

“I don’t,” Eugene says, honestly. She scoffs. 

“If you didn’t believe, you wouldn’t be askin’ everyone who’ll speak to you ‘bout it,” she says. One arthritic finger is raised, jabbing warningly in the direction of Eugene’s chest. “You be careful. People don’t like to talk ‘bout this. Some questions are best left dead.”

Eugene knows well enough how most citizens of Ambrose feel about his newfound curiosity in the topic. He’s sure they long for the days in which he was glued to that typewriter and unable to part from it, for all the thoughts and ideas bubbling up and out of his brain. The drive to write has waned slightly, with the introduction of the so-called witch into Eugene’s life. 

Later that afternoon, he goes home and types out barely more than a paragraph before losing interest. The window beckons him, the gauzy curtains dancing in some invisible draft. When he pulls it open, they fall still. The smell of the outside floats in, a heavy, warm evening just like all the other ones. Eugene can’t shake the mental image of what the women had described to him. It seems incongruous, that so few people have seen the apparent witch, but so many have such a real idea of what it looks like. The white eyes, like some deep-sea fish. 

The sulphur from the swamp suddenly tinges the fragrant evening air. Eugene closes the window, and turns from it. On the desk, his typewriter sits squat and black, unfriendly with its empty page hanging from its mouth, a dead white tongue. 

Could it be some sort of illusion of truth? A folie à deux? Though it would be more of a folie à deux cent. If a story is passed down and repeated for long enough, people will begin to believe it. And if this spectre has been haunting Ambrose since the turn of the century, it might make sense if it had started out life as some tale to scare children. _Don’t go into the woods, the witch’ll get you!_ Except now all it seems to do is make the weather uncomfortable, and give old ladies something to feel important about. The skeptic is rearing its head in Eugene again, even though some small but significant part of him is oddly attached to believing it. Ambrose _is_ a strange place. Is it any stranger than any other cloistered, rural town? He doesn’t know, and that’s the problem.

He can’t settle. Eugene smokes a cigarette on the porch, and watches the woods. The sulphur smell is thick today, as though the air is being pushed over the swamp before it meets Eugene’s nose. The sky is white overhead, the clouds close and unhappy and threatening rain. It just makes the air feel even thicker, even more foul. Eugene blinks. Image one? Or has he passed that, is he peering into image two now? He can’t work out the distinction any more. The problem with his own stupid spot the difference analogy is that he doesn’t know which picture is the true one, the original one. 

Brenda had said the witch eats the hearts of men. Mary had said that the witch has powers to enter dreams. Eugene grinds the butt of his cigarette into the intricate ashtray from inside, and wonders at the line between storytelling and reality. The sun draws closer to the heads of the trees, the sullen white clouds from before now lit from underneath by a bloody pink light. 

_Pink sky at night, sailor’s delight_ , Eugene thinks. A dog howls from the shadowy woods. The sun always seems to set faster in there. He wonders if the witches eyes are white and sightless for the same reason deep sea fishes eyes are. Maybe if he walked a couple yards into the woods, he’d find it pitch black at its core, and thrumming with the same kind of energy that makes the trees murmur with no wind.

That night he lies asleep in bed and dreams of flowers pushing through every pore of his body. It’s painless, but when he tries to sit up, their thready newborn roots hold him fast to the mattress. Eugene’s helpless to do anything but lie there, eyes on the shadowy ceiling, and feel the flowers push up through him, and bloom.

When he wakes in the morning the room is sweet with the heady fragrance of night gardenia flowers. There’s dirt on the soles of his feet.

————

Eugene stops sleeping.

It’s not a conscious decision. He doesn’t sit down one night and cross ‘sleeping’ off his to-do list. It’s more of a gradual slide into insomnia. Nights of interrupted sleep, of writing later and later until the room is blue with dawn and Eugene is staring at pages of barely-more-than nonsense. He snatches more sleep curled up on the sofa in half an hour increments than he does in his bed. Nothing seems to preclude it. It’s like one day the switch in his brain flipped, and decided no more sleep was needed.

His body has other ideas. Eugene’s exhaustion is physical. The naps on the couch don’t help; before long he’s aching all over, groggy and bleary at all hours of the day. It’s all he can do to type out a page or so before he abandons his writing, only to return to it near-feverishly once night falls. _It’s the heat_ , he tells himself, dragging himself through a cold shower to wash the night from himself. _It’s the light it’s the caffeine it’s my own stupid brain —_

Whatever it is, Eugene can’t fix it. He takes to smoking more, laid flat on his back on the narrow porch that juts from the front of the shotgun, his cigarette the only light for a mile. The roof of the porch is painted eggshell blue. Eugene knows it means something, but the knowledge escapes him. The trees whisper in the night breeze. Eugene wonders what they could be saying to each other, to be talking so low.

“Let me in on the joke,” he murmurs, dryly. His cigarette rasps on his inhale. Inside, his typewriter sits, waiting for him. The stack of papers at its side is almost as tall as the machine itself. Eugene doesn’t relish proofreading what he knows must be a jumbled first draft. Some mornings he wakes slumped over his desk, the smell of cold coffee in his nose, paper stuck to his cheek when he lifts his head. Fresh words on the page. Even in sleep, he doesn’t get much rest. 

Tonight is muggy, and very very still. The wooden boards under Eugene are warm against his bare back. A week ago, he’d given Burgie more money to have the place for another month. He may feel like he’s knee deep in whatever spell this town holds, but he’ll be damned if it isn’t proving effective. When Eugene had left Mobile he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t come back without a first draft. His return grows ever closer.

The boards are more comfortable than he'd originally given them credit for, when he'd first laid down. He's not sure how long ago that had been; a glass of whiskey that had once been pretty full now sits empty and sticky at his side. If it was daytime, he'd be attracting wasps. Well, come to think of it, has he ever noticed bugs in Ambrose? Even mosquitos seem conspicuously absent. But he's heard cicadas, hasn't he? Listened to grasshoppers trill in the long grass that blankets the back yard. The whole bug thing is making his head hurt. Eugene groans, and shifts his head on the boards, drawing his cigarette up to his mouth to take a drag from it. More comfortable than his bed out here. More comfortable than that damn couch. The murmur of trees to keep him company; a distant kind of white noise, like being a kid and listening to your parents talk downstairs. The sound shifts, and changes, and then comes the high, reedy noise of a cicada rising up and over the trees. And Eugene thinks, _ah, there's the bugs_ , before —

A twig snaps. Curiously, Eugene lifts his head from the warm boards, chin on his chest as he peers around. Probing the inky darkness outside of the circle of his cigarette's light. So dark it feels textured. Velvet, brushed cotton, the hair on the back of a black dog's neck. His own neck aches from craning it in his prone position. 

A figure stands at the foot of the porch steps. Pale eyes floating in that black dog darkness. 

Eugene shoots up with a yelp, the knuckle of his index finger awash in pain until he shakes it, disoriented. His burning cigarette butt bounces across the deck, a shimmer of sparks to track its path. Chest heaving, Eugene looks to the stairs, and sees nothing. Looks to the forest; sees even less. 

Was it a dream? He can't ever remember falling asleep. Eugene scrambles up from the boards, his fingers bright spots of pain from where the cigarette had sunk so low it had burned him. Ash falls to the ground as he stands, and Eugene swipes at his bare chest, at the cigarette ash that had fallen there and gotten caught in his sweat. Disoriented is too mild a word to explain how he's feeling. It's like that generous glass of whiskey had shot directly to his head and then some. He sways, and braces his hand to the wall of the house as he looks to the woods once again. The perma-blackness of his dream is gone. After that, the shadows that pool between the trees almost look inviting. 

Inside, the house is quiet, and dim. The lamp beside the sofa is on, and a slice of light falls into the hallway from the open bathroom door. Eugene goes to the sink, turning the faucet with far more force than necessarily, and sighs as he gets his burned knuckles under the cold water. 

His pulse beats in his ears. Around him, the house sighs and settles in the heat. Eugene is reminded once more of that second impression of Ambrose he'd had; when he'd begun to see it for what it is. Some semi-organic, earth-made _thing_. By extension, is this house not a part of it too? It makes him feel like he's in the belly of the beast, eyes wide and heart thrumming as his hand shakes under the cold water. He's afraid. It takes him a moment to realise, but he's afraid. Those wide-set, deep-sea eyes. It had felt too real to be a dream. 

The burn on his finger is pure white. It doesn’t hurt. 

Could he still be asleep?

\------

"What's up with you?" Burgie asks him, the following Saturday. He'd arrived in that old truck an hour ago, armed with beers and the dog, and they've been outside and sweating ever since. 

Eugene's face feels tight with sunburn. "Pilot light is out on the stove," he says, and closes his eyes as he takes a drag from his cigarette. They feel like hot coals in his head. It's been four days since he'd fallen asleep on the porch. When he'd come out to take a look the following morning, he'd found a wasp busy in the sticky residue at the bottom of his glass.

"That's all?" Burgie asks. He has a way of speaking that invites you into adding more on top of it. Eugene normally feels no way about it, but today he resents it.

"I feel like someone's fuckin' with me," he mumbles, eyes still closed. He can feel the sun on his eyelids, turning the black world inside his head into shades of orange, red, yellow. All those fleshy, hot colours. "But I know it's just all in my head."

Burgie is silent to his side. Eugene can't fight his eyes open to look at him, so just stays quiet too. He's normally a good read on someone's silence, but not today. His hairline is wet with sweat. He's practically falling asleep sitting up; about to mash his face into first his cigarette and then the wood deck under their feet. 

"Well," Burgie says, finally, and adds no more. Eugene makes a noise of agreement. 

_I think I fell asleep in image one and woke up in image two_ , he wants to say, as if it wouldn't be complete gibberish to anyone but himself. _I think this town is giving me insomnia._ He can't find a sane way to express himself. _Sometimes I think you're all just the same as the trees and the dirt and I'm the only full-blood human walking around here._ Burgie would bundle him in that truck and take him to an asylum faster than Eugene could blink.

"I'm not sleepin' well," Eugene says. He takes a drag from his cigarette, and the smoke he exhales a second later lingers in the still air. He flaps a hand through it, absently. "I think I'd give my soul for a good night's sleep."

"Shouldn't say that," Burgie mutters, but nudges Eugene's shoulder companionably. "You too hot? Flo left a fan in the closet."

"Yeah, I got it," Eugene mutters, tiredly. "I dunno what it is. I keep fallin' asleep and then wakin' up without realisin' I ever went to sleep in the first place. And then I find out I've done shit like cook, or write." He groans, and smears his hand over his face. When he opens his eyes again, the sun seems even harsher; lancing into his eyes even as he screws them up. "If I weren't gettin' so much done I'd think about movin' back to Mobile."

He can't tell Burgie about the other night. The blind fish eyes at the bottom of the steps. He's half-afraid that if he falls asleep again, they'll be there waiting for him. Eugene knows the minute he says it out loud he'll feel foolish, especially in the face of Burgie's down-to-earth calm. The man's like an unmovable stone. He'd laugh right in Eugene's face. 

"Maybe you're just chasin' sleep too hard," Burgie says, turning his bottle of beer over in his hands. "Sometimes I think it's so quiet out here it makes it hard to drop off."

"Maybe," Eugene echoes, dully. The dog whines at his feet, eyes pricked forward and listening to nobody.

They share the silence for a time. Eugene thinks he dozes. One minute Burgie is tearing the label from his empty beer bottle, and the next he has a fresh one, chilled from the fridge. Eugene can tell by the ring of condensation making a puddle at its feet. He's rolling a cigarette too, eyes on his hands though he seems to sense Eugene's coming awake.

"I know you've been askin' 'round town about what I told you," he murmurs. Eugene rolls his head to the side to look at the man, face half-shadowed by that cap, broad hands delicate as he shuffles the tobacco in its paper cocoon. "I dunno if what you heard is makin' you sleepless, but --" He shrugs. "All that is just the talk of old women. It ain't true."

Eugene closes his eyes, tongue feeling thick and dry in his head. "You told me yourself there's a witch," he slurs, and clears his throat. Cottonmouth. He's probably dehydrated beyond belief. "You gonna say that's just talk?"

"There's a difference between a witch, and the thing those women believe in."

Eugene fishes for his beer, tucked away in the shadow of the seat. "Is there?" he asks, and takes a long pull from the lukewarm bottle. "You weren't sayin' that last time."

He can feel Burgie's frustration without having to look at him. Eugene isn't even trying to argue; he's too tired for anything like that. It just doesn't make sense for Burgie to go back on something he had been so adamant about not two weeks ago. Again, Eugene wonders at that line between repeated fiction and wobbly reality. Is Burgie straddling the fault line of it just as Eugene is? Or is there something ulterior behind his one-eighty? Eugene slits his eyes open to look at Burgie again, his attention roving as he tries to spot the difference in the image before him. Ever since he had fallen asleep on the deck earlier in the week, wakefulness has felt intangible. Even now Eugene wonders if he's about to jolt awake from this conversation, to find Burgie in the same seat, in the same position, talking about something that might make sense. 

"I just think it ain't somethin' you should let sit in your mind," Burgie mutters, eventually. His tone has an air of finality about it. A sudden cooling breeze stirs Eugene's hair, stirs the smoke from Burgie's cigarette. "Nothin' good comes from stewin' in things."

Eugene bites back on what he wants to say, and instead sighs, and relaxes back into the seat. It's an old plastic thing, stained with age and made pale by the sun. It creaks with him. "Maybe you're right," he says, with fair emphasis on the maybe. The heat is lulling him into a doze again, and the beer and his own sleeplessness isn't helping. "I'm so tired," he breathes, as he feels Burgie ease his beer from his lax hand. "Feels sometimes like I'm gonna fall asleep and never wake up again."

"Shouldn't say that," Burgie says, again, but Eugene has less than a foot in the waking world now, and can't dissect the meaning in his tone. 

When he wakes again, he's sunburned; the sun having dropped low enough in the sky to peek under the cover of the blue-roofed porch. The seat by Eugene's side is empty; no Burgie, no dog, no errant beer bottles to be seen. Eugene sits up to look around himself, squinting against the low sun and blinking blearily at the ashtray that sits on the table between the two plastic chairs. 

One cigarette butt stares back. _Lucky Strike_ stamped in its gold circle on the end. 

\-------

On Sundays, Ambrose doesn't move. The town feels stodgy, stuck in treacle, ghostly quiet. Sometimes Eugene takes himself up the road to roam the streets, knowing that he won't be disturbed. The church is the vibrant little centre of it all; packed to the gills, Eugene presumes. He hasn't been inside yet. Hasn't worked up the wherewithal to go pretend to pray in front of a load of strangers, the lot of them needling holes in his back with their eyes. No, he likes to smoke a cigarette and let his mind roam. Sometimes he takes a notepad and sits down by the creek that runs like a brown ribbon on the other side of Ambrose. The sound of the rushing water, the rustling of the trees. It all feels different, here. Like the proximity to the main road makes all of Ambrose's weirdness fade a little. 

This is not one of those Sundays.

Instead of a leisurely walk into the middle of Ambrose, Eugene takes a cold shower, and shaves for the first time in a while. Sundays had always been drummed into him by his mom as a day reserved for getting yourself and your life straight; he's been working most of his adult life to try and unlearn it. But sometimes it comes in handy. 

He cleans the stove, its pilot light still stubbornly broken. He cleans the bathroom, cleans the porch; throws out cigarette butts and beer bottles, even tidies the desk he writes at. _Clean house, clean mind_ his mom used to say. Eugene would take a scrubbing brush to the inside of his head, if it meant clearing away even a fraction of the grogginess that's plaguing him. 

He still isn't sleeping right. Once the initial burst of energy wears away, Eugene crashes. Sleeps with his face pushed into the scratchy weave of the sofa cushions. When he wakes, his head is pounding; he gets up and goes straight for the sink, drinks three glasses of water in a row. Straight from the faucet, and metallic-tasting. It does little to quench his thirst. He feels like he sweats out whatever water he puts in almost immediately. 

"Hey!" a voice calls. 

Eugene, cheeks full of water, almost spits it out. He swallows hard, and stares into the sink, listening to the pounding of his heart, his own breathing. His own warped reflection looks back, made long and bulbous in the curve of the faucet. _Did I hear that, or did I imagine it?_ he thinks, willing himself not to look over his shoulder to check. The last sign of madness must be interacting with the figments your mind dreams up. Unless...

Unless Eugene never woke up from his nap on the sofa. Just like the time with Burgie, on the porch, waking in his chair to the complete absence of --

"Hey, can you hear me?" 

The same voice again, accompanied by the shake of the screen door as the owner of the voice knocks on it. If Eugene's imagining this, it's a pretty persistent hallucination. 

The fabric of the screen door renders most into obscurity. The figure that Eugene approaches is little more than pixels; chopped up by the netting. 

"Who is it?" he calls, uselessly. He's swinging the screen open before the figure on the other side has a chance to respond. 

Neither of them say anything for a long, protracted minute. Eugene's mind is still half-melted into the cushions of that sofa, and so is slow to gather words. Instead his eyes skip over the man on his doorstep; taking in deep, smooth skin, a plush upper lip, the wildness of humidity-touched curls over pale eyes. And suddenly, he feels awake. The air feels fresher, lighter. Like stepping from a steamy shower room to the clear air outside. Eugene has to fight to keep the relief from showing on his face, and suspects that he may not have done a good job at it, judging by the way that full mouth splits in a smile.

"Anyone home?" those lips say. When Eugene drags his eyes up to meet that pale gaze, it's teasing; playful. 

Eugene clears his throat. His tongue still feels slow and stupid in his mouth, though for different reasons than before. "What?" he says, eloquently. And then, even better, "Who are you?"

The man's smile sharpens, wickedly amused. "Did Burgie not tell you I was gonna drop by?" He sticks a hand into the space between them, and Eugene takes it almost on reflex. Despite the sweat slicking the little curls at the man’s hairline, his hand is cool, and rough. Eugene swallows. Image two? "I'm Snafu," the man continues. "Burgie said you had a pilot light out."

Eugene releases Snafu's hand, and grabs at the first thought that swims across the front of his brain. "It's a Sunday," he says. Snafu's smile is rictus, now. His eyebrows raise.

"Yes, it is," he replies, once it becomes clear that Eugene is neither budging from the doorway nor conjuring up anything else to say. His eyes dart, peering over Eugene's shoulder into the room beyond. "Can I come in?"

"Oh," Eugene says, and then, "God, sorry, I'm --" He steps back from the doorway. Still Snafu lingers, eyes flicking over Eugene's face and into the house. "Come in," Eugene adds, and Snafu inclines his head, and crosses the threshold. Eugene lets the screen bang shut, but sticks to the doormat, unsure. 

"Sorry 'bout droppin' 'round," Snafu says, looking around the room as he ventures further in. "I thought Burgie might've given you a heads up."

"I guess I haven't seen him in a couple days," Eugene murmurs, watching the man closely. There's something about him, something in the coiled, wiry energy of his body, that feels oddly familiar. His eyes swing around to meet Eugene's again, and the jolt of recognition catches, and settles. Snafu would be doe-eyed if his gaze wasn't so sharp and so pale. Green, or grey, maybe blue? Eugene can't tell from this distance. 

"Maybe that's it," he says, and grins. It's less of a smile, and more of a baring of teeth. Eugene feels rooted to the spot. He's written about this feeling before, but has never experienced it himself. The freeze response, that last ditch attempt by anything small and fluffy that's looking down a highway of teeth. 

Snafu's smile softens, and settles. Image two. Eugene fights the urge to flop over and play dead.

"I'm sorry," Eugene says, following Snafu as he crosses the room and sets his tool bag down on a kitchen counter. "Do I know you?"

A cigarette has appeared from nowhere, and now wobbles between the man's lips as he casts a thoughtful eye over Eugene, from toe to the top of his head. "Well, I don't know you," he says, and laughs. It's charming, loud bark of a laugh. Eugene feels himself unwind, ever so slightly.

"Weird," he mutters, more to himself than to the man, who is busying himself lifting the burner head on the offending ring. He crosses behind Snafu, who is seemingly absorbed in his task. "I thought I recognised you."

"I've been told I'm a little James Dean-esque," the guy mutters. Eugene laughs -- he doesn't. Just shoots Eugene an unreadable look over his shoulder, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. 

Eugene finds he can’t tear his eyes from him. Even when Snafu turns back to his task, Eugene stands there stupidly behind him and stares at the back of his head. The muggy heat of the house, the noise of the fan in the other room. What had Eugene been doing before the man arrived? His day feels like a slate wiped clean. 

“Can I grab you anything?” he asks, and surprises himself by how small his voice comes out. Snafu is fascinating. Eugene watches the shift of his back beneath his t-shirt, eyes on the knotted cord necklace that rises above the collar. “Water, beer,” he adds, uselessly. 

Snafu snorts. “You tryna get me drinkin’ on the job?” Something makes a noise, metal on metal. “Nah, I won’t be here long enough for it.” 

_Then stay_ , Eugene finds himself thinking. Every vague plan he’s had for his day has gone from his mind along with memory of his morning. Just waking from his nap, the bang of the screen door —

Again, that sneaking thought. Had he ever woken?

Snafu’s cigarette smoke is so pungent that it’s beginning to make Eugene feel lightheaded. Something like cloves but not quite; something cloying and strange. When Eugene focuses on it, he’s sure the smoke is moving of its own accord. Grasping and clawing at the air, sinking its fingers into Snafu’s curls, tumbling away to lick up the edges of the cabinets, to bend its head against the ceiling. Eugene stares at it, rapt.

“Weird cigarette,” he says, faintly, and sways on his feet. Snafu glances absently over his shoulder, and then does a double-take, brows drawing down in worry as his eyes lock onto Eugene.

“Hey,” he says, and plucks the smoke from his mouth as he straightens up. “Are you alright?” 

Eugene, who is definitely feeling far more clammy than sweaty now, grunts. His throat feels narrowed, so small that any words he tries to force up die a quick death on the back of his tongue. “Mmm,” he manages, and wobbles himself over to the sofa. It draws him in, old reliable, his bed for the last week. The heat and the smoke are warping the room, the walls blooming and bending into him; Eugene shuts his eyes just to try and ignore it, but the spinning gets worse. He presses a hand to his eyes, feels the cold sweat he’s pouring with. 

Snafu is talking. “Shit — I’m sorry,” he mutters. Eugene hears the faucet run, a window open, followed by another. Dimly, he thinks, _put the bug screens down_ but can’t force those words up either. The smoke still lingers in the room, Eugene can taste it with every shallow inhale. 

Silence. Like someone has unplugged the world. Eugene can’t even sense Snafu’s presence anymore; no footsteps, no breathing, no weight of his body bending the air. No birds sing. Even the creaky old standing fan in the bedroom has fallen quiet. For a heartbeat, it’s peaceful. But then Eugene feels that untethered-ness he always associates with childhood; the fear that the world blinks out of existence the minute you close your eyes to sleep. Suddenly, there’s no sofa under him, no muggy, smoky air in his lungs. The panic flashes through him like a shot, and when he tears his hand from other his eyes it’s to find Snafu so close to him that he can’t bite back on the yelp of surprise it knocks out of him. 

Green. His eyes are green. Green like the woods, so green that Eugene doesn’t know how he could’ve mistaken them for anything else. He can’t understand how he couldn’t sense him when the man was standing so close. 

“Are you okay?” Eugene watches Snafu’s mouth move on the words, hears the sound of them a heartbeat later. He’s so out of it that it takes a moment for the words to sink in, to register. Some five second delay on everything as it drags through the thick air. Distantly, dimly, he’s embarrassed for this. The feeling pales in the face of the pure disorientation that’s spinning his head around. Snafu’s mouth moves again, and Eugene watches it closely. “D’you want a glass of water?”

He nods. Sound is coming back, though it’s only the rushing of his own blood in his ears. Somewhere in the muddle of himself, Eugene finds his voice. “I ain’t been sleepin’ right,” he mumbles. Snafu’s hand touches his, easing the glass into his hand. “I ain’t eaten, I’m sorry.”

“You’re gonna think I tried to kill ya.” Snafu’s voice seems to be coming from all around, bouncing off the walls and into Eugene’s ears at all the wrong angles. When he blinks open his eyes, Snafu’s sat on the coffee table, hands between his knees and expression contrite. “You look like shit,” he adds, helpfully. 

“Thanks,” Eugene croaks. He shudders the glass of water to his lips to take a sip, and then wrinkles his nose. “Was this glass clean?”

“I dunno.” Snafu’s eyes stay steady on Eugene’s face. “Found it in the sink.”

Eugene nods, and sighs, sinks back into the couch cushions. “Okay,” he breathes. The world is beginning to steady itself, just as long as he keeps his eyes open. He fixes them on the view of the forest outside the window, and drinks his water. “What the fuck were you smokin’?” he asks, after a moment of silence. 

Snafu snorts, and glances away. His fingers twist between his knees. “Tobacco, other stuff. I guess everyone else is pretty used to it, I never think.” He looks to Eugene again, and then sighs; pats his palms to his thighs and stands. “You stay there. I gotta finish up what I came here for, huh?” He grins, something distinctly sharp tucked away behind his teeth. Eugene takes another sip of water, and pushes his hand up through his sweaty hair as Snafu goes back to what Eugene had interrupted. 

_Tobacco, other stuff_. It had smelled like church incense. Like burning leaves, like sulphur. Eugene can't place it. The water tastes off too. Very slowly, Eugene sets it down, and rights himself. The world seems half a step behind him, or maybe it's him who's half a step behind it. The room moves with him, just as his vision greys. _Other stuff_ , he thinks. Head too cloudy and filled with cotton to do anything more than think. 

"How d'you know Burgie, again?" he asks, eyes on the glass of water sitting innocuously on the table. The surface of the water has a sheen to it; almost oily, cloudy. Could it just be from his lips? His sweat? The water from the faucet always tastes a little off. Again, Eugene finds himself treading water between the real world and the not-so-real world. Sometimes he feels like Ambrose's madness has made a home in him. 

"We met in 'Nam," Snafu says. He drops a screwdriver into his toolkit, and fishes something else out. "Funny, ain't it? I've lived in this area all my life, and I go to a country thousands of miles away, and meet a guy who lives ten miles from me." He laughs. Eugene watches the surface of the water shudder. It's impossible to tell what's normal and what isn't, when all the strange things are so minor that the only thing that makes them strange is their frequency. 

His head still feels like it's only vaguely attached to his body. Eugene swallows, his throat sticking with how dry his mouth feels. 

"That's funny," he says. "Really funny."

Snafu fixes the pilot light with little fanfare. One minute Eugene is feeling brave enough to cross to the sink to empty and refill his water glass, and the next Snafu is dumping his tools back in his kit, and taking a step away. 

"Done," he says, and lights the pilot to show Eugene. "See?" 

"Thank you," Eugene says, watching the tiny blue flame flicker. "I appreciate it."

"'S nothin'," Snafu says, and flicks the flame off. "You alright now?" 

Eugene nods, silently. Standing this close, he can smell that cigarette again. It seems to cling to Snafu's hair, to his clothes. Such an odd, multilayered smell that it's impossible to pinpoint it; like some rich perfume engineered to send Eugene's head spinning. The man seems to be waiting for a reply from Eugene, standing there with a vaguely expectant expression on his face. Dimly, Eugene casts around for something to say that isn't one of the many questions popping up in his head. _How come Burgie's never mentioned you?_ is right there at the forefront of his mind.

"I'm good, gonna eat something, maybe lie down," Eugene manages, and shrugs. 

"Well," Snafu says, and picks his kit off the counter. "Keep your water up. The humidity's the real killer, y'know. Can't tell how dehydrated you are until somethin' like that happens."

"Sure," Eugene mutters, and then, because he's coming slowly back to his senses, and the curiosity will kill him if he doesn't ask, "Burgie's never mentioned a caretaker. I always just assumed he took care of stuff himself."

Snafu flashes Eugene an easy grin, halfway to the door and getting kissed by the sunlight beyond. "Burg ain't exactly the chatty type."

Eugene finds himself stumped. There's no arguing with that. Then Snafu sinks a hand into his curls, something so effortlessly charming in the gesture, and adds, “I’ll see you around?”

Eugene clears his throat, and glances over Snafu’s shoulder. The sun is already hanging heavy in the sky. How much time has passed? Then Snafu shifts, and the tools in his box clatter together, and Eugene is reminded that he’s lingering, waiting for an answer. “Sure,” he croaks. “See you around.”

Snafu's face splits into a wolfish grin. Outside, through the open door, a cicada starts to sing. "See you around,” the man echoes. He even nails Eugene's accent; bites off the end of his words a little too sharply for his own Louisiana drawl. It's uncanny, really. Eugene used to know a girl who kept a parrot, that would echo the noise of the motorcycle that a neighbour used to loudly rev in the evenings. Hearing his own voice from Snafu's mouth has the same quality.

Eugene thinks of the note he'd scrawled, that very first afternoon in Ambrose. _They're all mannequins_. The more he sees of the place, the more he feels inclined to believe it. 

After Snafu leaves, silence settles over the house. Eugene wanders through to the bedroom, to find the fan still and silent. On his desk, the papers are all just ever-so-slightly skewed, like someone has run a hand across them all. 

The room smells like Snafu's cigarette. 

\-------

“Hey,” Burgie says, when Eugene wanders into the store around noon, ill-rested but full of coffee. “You look good.”

Grabbing at a bottle of milk from the fridge, Eugene throws an eye roll over his shoulder. “I bet you say that to everyone who comes through.”

"Ha," Burgie says, in reply. The frayed bill of his baseball cap hides his expression from Eugene as he lowers his head. He's sat in the folding chair that he keeps behind the register, newspaper open on his knee. When Eugene comes closer a few minutes later, he sees that Burgie has it open to the crossword, and seems to be deliberating over it. 

Setting the milk down on the counter, followed by a loaf of bread, a bag of apples, Eugene asks, "What's the hint?" 

"Nine letter word, 'partiality'." Burgie scratches at his temple with the end of his pencil, brows beetled. "I shouldn't do these things after lunch."

"You're setting yourself up for failure," Eugene agrees, counting dollar bills from his wallet. Burgie ignores both him and the groceries. They're the only people in the store, besides the dog laying sleepily in a patch of sun thrown through the front windows. The fan behind Burgie sways hypnotically from side to side, the coloured tape attached to the front flickering in the air. Eugene keeps angling himself to keep the air on him. The shop is as close and hot as ever, even with the front door standing open, a brick kicked under it to try and tempt some air in. But for air to come in, there has to be a breeze first, and Eugene has yet to feel one today. The fan behind Burgie is the only thing shifting the air around, and even that is just an ineffectual pushing of hot air to different parts of the building. 

Silently, Eugene sets the money down on the counter, and begins to bag his own groceries. Burgie is chewing the end of the pencil now, completely stumped on the one question.

"Maybe just go to the next one," Eugene offers, helpfully. The bag of apples rustles as he tucks them in next to the milk. 

"Ain't you the writer?" Burgie asks, finally glancing up. "Shouldn't you know words?"

"All of them?" Eugene asks, teasingly. He's in a good mood today. Yes, he might've fallen asleep on the porch and woken on it too, but a full night's sleep is nothing to complain about, despite his grogginess. He feels ready to indulge Burgie and rack his brain for the answer. "Partiality..." he murmurs, and then pulls a face. "And nine letters?" He hefts his shopping bag onto his hip, and begins drawing letters in the air. "F-A-V-O-R-I -- oh, dammit. Never mind."

He wants to ask Burgie about Snafu, but now that the pedantic side of his brain has been activated he can't think of anything beyond nine letters, 'partiality'. Bias, favouritism, the subjective preference of one thing over another. Sweat is beading his hairline from standing in this greenhouse of a general store for so long. He doesn't know how Burgie does it, but maybe he can thermoregulate like a hare. Eugene wouldn't put it past him for a second.

There's the unfair, preferential definitions of partiality, but -- Eugene is ignoring the other side of it in its entirety. A fondness, a particular liking of something that goes beyond real sense. Burgie's partiality for that horrible old cap. Eugene's own partiality for old things. It's the reason why he still lugs around that old manual typewriter from the fifties. Love, passion, penchant -- shit. 

"Obsession," he blurts, finger freezing in its midair scrawlings. "Does it fit?" 

Eugene watches Burgie trace it lightly into the boxes, and then grin. "Hey, nice work," he says, and goes over the faint grey letters. "See? I knew you'd know it."

"I guess I do know all the words," he jokes, and Burgie grunts. The tape attached to the standing fan makes a clicking noise as it rotates, stirring Eugene's sweaty hairline. The milk is chilly through the bag, through his shirt; he knows he'll be clutching it to him like some reverse hot water bottle the whole walk home. “Hey,” he says, as their conversation lapses and a gap presents itself. “Can I ask you something?”

Without looking up from his crossword, Burgie says, “Shoot.”

Eugene opens his mouth, ready to ask after the mysterious Snafu, but finds something inside himself holding the question back. He shuts his mouth, gazing down at Burgie scratching letters into the paper on his knee, oblivious. _Just ask_ , he thinks, at the same time some internal voice mutters, _why would Snafu lie?_ Why indeed. Eugene’s been peering sidelong at everything since his first strange day in Ambrose. Has the town finally gotten to him? Is his suspicion so strong that it extends to not only the town but every single inhabitant, every single person merely adjacent to it? 

Burgie is looking at him curiously. Eyes in shadow beneath the brim of his cap. “Gene?” he prompts, and Eugene shakes himself free of his thoughts. 

When he speaks, his mouth moves on autopilot. “Never mind,” he says, quickly. The bag in his arms rustles as he clutches it to his chest. “Dumb question.”

Burgie blinks at him. “Are you still havin’ trouble sleepin’?” he asks.

“No,” Eugene says, quickly. And then, “Yeah, a little.” It’s a half-lie. Last night he’d slept almost the whole way through, but he’d woken so groggy and so exhausted from a collection of vivid, frightening dreams that it feels as if he hadn’t slept at all. Flowers growing from his skin. Bodies sliding from the bellies of whales. In one, he had risen from bed and sat at his desk, and began to write at his typewriter like a man possessed. Not a single word had been in English, or any alphabet he’d ever seen. Eugene had woken finally at that one, with a jolt, covered in a light sheen of sweat. The bedroom still smelled like Snafu’s cigarette. _Tobacco, other stuff_. Church incense, damp moss, footsteps in dark soil. 

Burgie eyes him, and then drops his attention back to his crossword. “You could get some pills,” he says, lightly. “I got ‘em after the war. Work a treat.”

“They’ll make me groggy,” Eugene mumbles, inching slowly towards the door as he says so. “Groggier then no sleep, I mean.”

Burgie hums. “Alright. I got some leftover in the cabinet if you need them.”

Eugene turns the offer over in his mind on the long, hot walk home. He’d taken sleeping pills for a period of time after he’d written his first book. Seized with anxiety that it was going to get roundly rejected, he hadn’t slept for days. So this bout of insomnia is far from his first, and in some ways, far from the worst too. If it wasn’t for the dreaming, he’d be able to manage it. But still, the idea of sleeping pills leave him cold. The period of time in which he’d been dosed up with those is still hazy to him, even now. He remembers deep, cottony sleep. Deadened, distant days. Not a single image from that time sticks. He’d stopped writing. He’d stopped doing much of anything, besides eating and sleeping. It’s not something he would willingly welcome back into his life on a whim. He’ll sleep well soon, he’s sure of it, and without pills to knock him out.

Eugene swaps his groceries for a beer once he gets home, and takes that and his notebook out onto the porch for a cigarette. The plastic seat is warm against the backs of his thighs as he settles in with a sigh. Cigarette, lighter, the first draw of smoke into his lungs. The strip of ribbon marking his place in his notebook is fraying, the red thread fluffy and pulling away from itself. Absently, Eugene picks at it, the hand with his cigarette braced to his temple as he zones out. 

Images from his dreams keep resurfacing at random moments throughout the day. Deep-sea dead eyes, and the give of muscle in his hands. What had been vivid at the time has faded into a smooth nothingness, unraveling in his mind like the ribbon he’s toying with. Eugene yawns. Maybe he should get a book of crossword puzzles. Maybe he should work on his goddamn book.

Sleep comes easier on the porch. Doesn’t it always, when you’re somewhere that you can’t stay? The old plastic lawn chair is suddenly the most comfortable bed in the world; the sun peeking its brow under the roof of the porch suddenly a comforting warmth. The beer cold and sweating between his thighs, cigarette burning away in his fingers unnoticed. 

Hours later, Eugene wakes to darkness. The porch light off — never turned on, no moths to flit around it. Just him and the moon, the yawning presence of the forest. Silence, so much silence that the night rings with it. Eugene’s arms are pebbled with goose pimples, despite the warm night; all the hairs on his body standing up in a prickling wave as he looks to the woods, brain still spacey and slow from waking so suddenly from a dead sleep.

A cry rings out. The eerie scream of a fox. When Eugene closes his eyes again, blackness pulls him back under, and he goes easily into the dreams that wait for him. 

————

It doesn’t take long for Snafu’s assistance to be needed again. In the space of a week, the bathroom sink begins leaking, the ceiling fan stops running, and Eugene goes to pull open a cabinet only for the door to come away from the hinge in his unsuspecting hand. For a second, he had just blinked into the depths of the cupboard. The jar of peanut butter in there, exposed to the light, had blinked back.

“You must be stronger than you look,” Snafu says, muscles working in his arms as he screws the door back into place. He tosses an impish grin over his shoulder, to which Eugene flushes. “Way stronger.”

“What’re you tryin’ to say?” Eugene asks, suspiciously, but Snafu just laughs instead of answering. 

It’s a handful of days after Eugene had woke to find a puddle of water on the bathroom floor. He isn’t quite sure how Snafu had gotten the message about the various things which needed fixing, but he’s sure it’s more to do with his own foggy memory than anything else. A week ago he’d brought up a conversation to Burgie that they had never had, one that Eugene must’ve dreamed, judging by Burgie’s blank confusion. The man doesn’t let a joke run on past its natural end, and certainly not when Eugene is so visibly upset by it. It hadn’t felt good. Now Eugene feels as though he’s walking on eggshells, careful to examine his memories before he mentions them, for fear of getting muddled like that again.

So no, he doesn’t ask Snafu if Burgie had sent him. Eugene’s learning to use his brain. If Snafu is here, toolkit in hand, then Burgie had sent him because Eugene had mentioned the repairs. No need to bring up forgotten conversations and make Burgie wrinkle his brow at him, all concerned. No need to weird Snafu out more than he’s already been weirded out by Eugene. Even thinking about that first meeting has Eugene feeling red around the ears.

“You been up to much?” Snafu asks, as he hops down from the chair he’d pulled away from the rarely-used kitchen table. The movement makes his curls bounce, sends the light catching at the pretty gold earring in his lobe. Eugene watches it, transfixed. A dark stone peers back.

“Nothin’,” he says, absently. There’s something transfixing about every inch of Snafu. The longer Eugene’s near him, the more intoxicated he feels. Eyes lingering on his knuckles, on the pale curve of a scar bisecting his palm. Cropped close hair at the nape of his neck, like velvet. His quick-to-smirk mouth, his hooded eyes. A hungry tattoo yawns from his sternum, revealed beyond his loosely buttoned shirt. Black fur and fangs. Abruptly, Eugene is reminded of his dreaming, though no visual surfaces from the mire. Just a strange familiarity, pale recognition. He can’t tear his gaze from the dog’s yellow eyes.

Snafu, spotting his distraction, touches his fingertips idly to his chest. He grins, showing off all his teeth. “You like it?”

“It’s sure somethin,’,” Eugene mutters, detaching uneasily from the tattoo. When he glances up, Snafu’s smile has dropped, pale eyes intent on Eugene’s face. Searching, serious. Then they dart, and he seems to realise that Eugene’s attention has shifted. The smile comes back. The lazy amusement in his eyes warms them up once more.

“Got it in ‘Nam,” Snafu says, easily, as he turns towards the back of the house. Still speaking over his shoulder, he adds, “You ever sweated through a jungle in dirty uniform with your chest like raw fuckin’ meat?” He laughs at Eugene’s grimace. “Can you imagine it?”

“I wouldn’t even like to,” Eugene says, and means it. The thought makes him nauseous. “Surprised it didn’t get infected,” he adds, watching as Snafu gets on his knees to open the cabinet under the sink, and peer inside. 

“I’m very robust,” he mutters, and then sticks a flashlight in his mouth, which he proceeds to garble words around. “All the ink seeped out and stained my vest.” Something rattles to the floor of the cabinet, and Eugene watches Snafu scoop it up and drop it into the pocket of his shirt. It makes the front sag, pulls it down and shows even more of that tattoo. Leering out at Eugene as Snafu mumbles nonsense around the flashlight. Again, his eyes lock with it, and linger. The room quiets. Snafu’s voice sounds very far away. 

Eugene dodged Vietnam by the skin of his teeth and an ill-advised undergraduate he’s still in debt to his parents for. There’s the smell of sharp jungle in his nose. Like dark dirt and wet leaves. He swears the tattoo’s tongue lolls. 

“Gene,” Snafu’s voice cuts neatly through, and snaps Eugene back to the matter at hand. “Pass me my wrench, willya?” 

Woodenly, Eugene crouches down to paw through the toolkit on the floor, his hands like someone else’s on the end of his arms. The smell is gone; only the memory of it lingers. Eugene knows that will be gone too, soon enough. His hands turn up a screwdriver, which Snafu glances at for a second before snorting.

“Nah,” he makes a C-shape with his thumb and index finger. “Like this. The littlest one.”

He seems oblivious to Eugene’s zoning out, taking the correct tool with an absent thanks before delving back into the twist of pipes beneath the sink. Eugene had half-heartedly poked around in there the previous night, knees wet from kneeling in the pool of water that washing his hands was bringing with it. He watches Snafu for a second, that tattoo twisted away from him now. His profile, set in concentration. Eugene thinks he could stand and look at him for hours. 

The words are leaving his mouth before he can think about them. “You should stay for a beer,” Eugene blurts. In the cabinet, Snafu makes an interested noise. “Yeah, y’know. As thanks.”

Snafu emerges, grinning. Hands wet and catching the bathroom light as he wipes them on his jeans. “As thanks,” he parrots. “What time is it?”

Eugene glances at his watch. “Late enough for a beer on the weekend.”

Snafu’s grin grows. “It’s Thursday.”

“Thursday?” Eugene asks, glancing to the side as he tries to mentally track back through the week. With no routine or normal sleep to speak of, the days and nights have been running seamlessly into each other. “Shit.” Eugene casts around for another excuse, but comes up empty in the face of Snafu ducking back under the sink. His stomach sinks.

There’s a clatter, and Snafu sighs. “Hold my flashlight?” he asks, peering over his shoulder at Eugene. “Can’t see for shit.” 

After a beat, Eugene moves; unsticks himself from his slump against the doorjamb to kneel down on the floor with Snafu. It’s a tight squeeze, the bathroom wasn’t ever made with more than a single occupant in mind. Then Snafu hands him the flashlight, and Eugene aims it over his shoulder, and Snafu says, “Sure, I’ll stay for a drink.”

The beam of light wobbles. Illuminated in it, Snafu’s hands work quickly at tightening a bolt before dropping away. This close, Eugene can smell cloves on his hair, on his clothes. Something sweet-spicy, fruity if it wasn’t so bruised, and overpowering. Then Snafu leans back from the pocket of space they’re sharing, and the scent moves with him. Eugene has to fight against the urge to drift along with it. 

“But before that,” Snafu begins, with a smile. His hand extends into the space between them, that pale scar on his palm turned up to the ceiling. “What’s next on the list?”

Eugene places the flashlight in his hand, and bites the inside of his cheek to keep his expression in check. “Ceiling fan in the bedroom,” he murmurs, and lets Snafu pull him up from the bathroom floor a heartbeat later. “I promise I don’t know how so many things got broken so quick.”

Snafu snorts, scratching a hand through his curls as he leads the way down the hall to Eugene’s bedroom at the back. “This place is old as hell,” he says, and sets his toolbox down next to Eugene’s typewriter, next to the ashtray, the stack of papers. “And not lived in very often; it shits the bed when someone comes here and actually starts using it.” He drags the chair from the desk, and hops up onto it without pause. Eugene grimaces at his dusty boots on the seat, but says nothing. He’s edging somewhat towards regret for his hasty invitation that Snafu stay to share a drink, though for no good reason that he can think of. Perhaps it’s just that more time in the man’s company means more time to make a fool of himself. 

“Pass me a screwdriver,” Snafu mutters, and Eugene obliges, eyes upturned to watch him at work. Again, that wave of attraction washes over him. The shift of muscles in Snafu’s arms. There’s another tattoo there, worn blue-grey and comfortable against the skin of his bicep. Eugene can’t make it out. 

Maybe regret isn’t the right word. Eugene doesn’t know what he’s feeling, if he’s being honest with himself. It feels like there’s something taking up residence in his head that he can’t look at head-on. Shadowy, out of the corner of his eye. The same thing that had kept him from asking Burgie about Snafu. Maybe the same thing which had him blurting an invitation to Snafu?

The ceiling fan gets fixed in short order, and it’s not long before Eugene’s calling out, “Beer, or whiskey?” through the screen door. The afternoon is mellowing; yellow and warm, and heavy with the perfume of honeysuckle. Outside on the porch, Snafu is a bundle of shapes translated through the thin mesh of the screen. It reminds Eugene vividly of the first time they’d met; that trepidation he’d felt approaching the dark figure waiting on the other side of his door.

“Whiskey!” Snafu calls back, and Eugene grabs a couple clean glasses from the cabinet, drops a couple ice cubes in them with a clatter before carrying them outside.

Snafu whistles when he sees the bottle, a slow smile spreading across his face as he half-stands to take the glasses that Eugene is juggling. “Whole bottle, huh?” he asks, a little black cigarette lit and wobbling in his mouth as he speaks. Again, that smell of cloves; stronger now. 

“Figured you earned more than one, since I managed to break so much ‘round here,” Eugene mutters, and takes a seat as he eyes that cigarette. _Tobacco, other stuff._ It’s not the same cigarette Snafu had been smoking the last time he was here. Eugene used to live with a girl who turned her lungs black with clove cigarettes. He’d recognise the smell in a heartbeat. 

Snafu doesn’t seem to notice Eugene’s preoccupation. He just grins, the seat underneath him creaking as he settles back in it, and watches Eugene pour him a drink. “I could get used to this,” he murmurs, pale green eyes swinging out over the dirt road that lies beyond the small front yard, and to the forest beyond that. He tosses Eugene a grin, and adds, “You think Burgie’d be suspicious if he had to keep payin’ me to come out here?” 

Eugene snorts, and hands the glass to Snafu before pouring himself a neat measure of the spirit. The ice is already melting in the glass, skimming around the bottom of it in a puddle of its own water. “I’d be shocked if you could get anythin’ over on him,” he says, and Snafu makes an amused noise. 

“You’d be surprised.” The ice in his class clinks as Snafu takes a swallow of it, and sighs. The cigarette is burning slowly between his fingers now, that bruised spicy-sweet smell. From this angle, Eugene can’t the tattoo. It’s nothing more than a flat black promise between his nipples, tamed for now. Then Snafu settles the bottom of his glass against his chest, and his eyes slip closed as he settles lower in his seat and adds, “So what brings you to Ambrose?” The corner of his mouth tugs in amusement. “Can’t be the bustlin’ atmosphere.”

Eugene laughs. “Exactly the opposite. Came here for some quiet.”

“Got plenty of it,” Snafu says, and when Eugene glances at him he’s smiling, eyes on the side of Eugene’s face. “Saw your typewriter inside. You any good?”

Eugene snorts, and glances away, pulling his pack of smokes from his back pocket as he ponders that question. He’s never been a very boastful person. But somehow people always like to ask him questions that force him to answer in a boastful way. “I’m pretty good,” he says, and slips his lighter from the near-empty pack to light himself up. Snafu’s still got that skinny black thing, pinched idly between his fingers. The smell of Eugene’s smoke joins the sweet clove smell, and mingles. He relaxes back into his seat with a sigh. “This is my second novel. Wasn’t havin’ any joy writin’ it at home, so I figured a change of pace might help.”

Snafu makes a curious noise. The ice clatters in his drink as he sips at it, seeming to roll Eugene’s words around in his head. “Huh,” he murmurs, eyes faraway. Then they drift to Eugene’s face, and sharpen, and Eugene feels that intoxicating draw towards the man once more. “And is it helping?” he asks, before drawing deep on his smoke. 

Eugene blinks, feeling oddly drunk from just the few mouthfuls of whiskey he’s had, from the sweet smoke fogging the close air beneath the porch’s roof. Not uncomfortably so, like last time. No dizziness, so shakes. Just pleasantly warm, pleasantly relaxed. “It was,” he says, voice sounding distant to his own ears. “I wrote like hell the first month or so.” He flicks his gaze away, eyes drawn once more to the woods. “Kinda petered out the last few weeks. I ain’t been sleepin’.”

Snafu makes a noise at that. “You said that last time I was here. Not any better?” 

Eugene shrugs. “I’m sleepin’ more than I was, but I ain’t rested.” He pauses, unsure how much he wants to spill. But the whiskey and Snafu’s company is loosening his tongue somewhat, so after he beat he adds, “I’ve been havin’ a lotta dreams. When I wake up it feels like my brain never switched off.” 

His chair creaks under him as Eugene sets his drink aside. There’s barely a centimetre of whiskey swimming in the bottom of it; pale from the ice that had melted so quick it had barely cooled the drink down. Snafu says nothing. Just takes a sip of his own drink, and hums thoughtfully. His cigarette rasps audibly as he takes a drag, and then the sweet smell of the smoke is refreshed. It hangs heavy and hazy in the still air, catching the low sunlight just so. Eugene watches it curl and disperse. The silence isn’t awkward, somehow. Snafu has an easy presence that Eugene hadn’t expected from him. 

A cicada starts to trill. Slowly, Snafu says, “Well, I hope sleepin’ gets easier for you soon.” Sunlight winks in the earring buried in his dark curls, in the rings he wears on his fingers. He’d taken them off earlier, before he started work. One by one, clattering onto Eugene’s coffee table as he’d watched in rapt fascination. He feels the same draw now, captivated by how the low sun kisses the planes of Snafu’s face. His eyes are closed again. Lashes dark and long. Eugene watches his mouth move, and hears the words a heartbeat later. “I always find that the minute you give up on sleep, it comes for you.”

 _And the dreams do too,_ Eugene wants to add, but doesn’t. He knows Snafu probably means well. The Eugene of two weeks ago would have jumped at any advice to get any of that elusive sleep. It’s not Snafu’s fault that his problem has shifted onto something with no clear fix. What’s out there to stop a person from dreaming? He can’t even complain of nightmares. They’re unsettling, sure, but not frightening. Eugene normally wakes with a sense of dull unease in his chest, spacey and confused and uncertain if he’s awake or still dreaming. Sometimes he wakes twice, a fast dual waking that leaves him even more uneasy because what’s to say a third is not around the corner? A fourth? He could be halfway through his day and then wake again, find himself clammy and disorientated in the grey dawn.

They finish their drinks. Conversation has turned light after Eugene’s talk of his sleep; they muse over Ambrose’s odd charm, over the hot weather. Eugene tells Snafu a little bit about his novel. Snafu smokes another black cigarette and takes the second whiskey that Eugene pours him with a Cheshire Cat smile. The late afternoon sunlight is painting him gold, that same warm yellow light that always spills into Eugene’s bedroom. Catching at the smoke in the air, at the dust, in Snafu’s teeth and his dark hair. Eugene’s sure if he were to sink his fingers into it, his hair would be hot. Stealing the sticky heat from the day. The tattoo on his chest watches the woods, yellow eyes sharp over the red snarl of its mouth. His fingers rest idly against it, the same way you’d keep your hand on the back of an angry dog’s neck.

Snafu is extolling the virtues of small town living, though Eugene is admittedly barely listening. His second whiskey is lukewarm from sitting on the table between them, no ice cube to even attempt at cooling it down. Somehow, he thinks its going to his head quicker. Don’t body temperature liquids absorb quicker? Or does that only pertain to water? He feels drowsy, and comfortable, curled up in the porch chair with his knee to his chest and Snafu’s low voice rolling over him. The drag of his accent, the smell of that sweet smoke when the breeze a gesture makes wafts it over to Eugene. 

“Livin’ in cities ain’t good for the soul,” Snafu is saying, eyes restless as he speaks. Swinging from Eugene’s face, to the glass on the table, to the sun-drenched world beyond the porch. “All that concrete?” He makes a face, wrinkles his nose. Eugene snorts. “History’s in the dirt. I don’t trust a city as far as I could throw it.”

“They’re fine in their own way,” Eugene murmurs, feeling loose-headed and fond. “It’s nice to go where nobody knows you. Ambrose was only that for me for about five minutes.” They laugh, and Eugene sips at the warm liquor in his glass. “Plus, little towns are weird.”

Snafu makes an interested noise, heavy-lidded eyes suddenly sharp behind his cigarette smoke. “You think Ambrose is weird?” he asks, and Eugene isn’t sure whether to laugh or not. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, this place ain’t like anywhere I’ve been before.”

The trees murmur as Snafu shifts, lounging further into the chair as props his ankle on his knee, and sighs. “‘Ain’t like anywhere’,” he mutters, eyes turning up to the roof. His arm rests along the back of his chair, wrist crooked to keep the cigarette smoke from his eyes. “Never noticed, myself.”

 _How?_ Eugene wants to ask, but knows the answer. All the small oddities that used to stand out so vividly to Eugene have been dulled by familiarity. And Ambrose is still a far cry from normal, but Eugene feels less hyperaware these days. So much so that he’s not sure whether he notices the strangeness as much. He thinks of the bottle of smashed milk, the white liquid seeping seamlessly into the grass that edges the stone path. Ambrose as a place, as a beast, feels hungry in some indistinct way that Eugene can’t put a finger on. 

“Sometimes I feel like this place is alive,” he mumbles, closing his eyes against the sun, lancing its way underneath the cover of the porch. “Like it’s got a pulse.”

The spindly metal table between them rattles as Snafu leans across the stub his cigarette out. His expression is unreadable, when Eugene cracks open an eye to gauge his reaction. Mouth flat, but something in his eyes that tells Eugene he’s holding back on laughter.

“Ain’t everythin’ got a pulse?” he asks, a smile flirting around his mouth. He tilts his glass, turning his eyes down to watch the whiskey inside move. “Everythin’s alive, you just gotta listen real close.” Slowly, his eyes slide to meet Eugene’s, and the smile that’s been threatening blooms. It’s quickly covered as he raises his glass to finish the remainder in one neat swallow, and by the time the glass hits the top of the table, the smile has been wiped away. “Thanks for the drink,” he adds, as he makes a move to stand, tucking the slim carton of cloves back into his jeans from where he’d abandoned them to the table. Eugene watches him sleepily, turning Snafu’s words over in his mind. 

“Do you really believe that?” he asks, and Snafu pauses in the doorway, glances back at Eugene who hasn’t moved an inch. 

“Sure,” he says, and his eyes seem paler in the direct, yellow light. Almost the same colour as the dog on his chest, and just as sharp. “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t.”

Eugene hums, and finishes his whiskey. Snafu slips inside, emerges with his toolkit, and together they linger for a moment. Eugene still sat in his chair, Snafu standing over him shifting the handle of his kit in his fists. The tools inside clatter together. Eugene breaks the silence first.

“Thanks for comin’ and savin’ me from floodin’ the damn place,” he says, and stands. Snafu huffs, and turns to take the short flight of steps to the gravel path beyond. The smell of cloves seems to travel with him. Had Eugene really just mistaken the smell for something else, the last time he’d been here? It’s likely. He’s been finding reason to second guess almost everything for the past couple of weeks after all. 

“Break somethin’ else and maybe I’ll see you again,” Snafu says, backlit by the low sun, his face thrown into shadow. Eugene thinks he can detect some amusement in his voice, but isn’t sure. The set of his shoulders is easy, relaxed. When he turns to the side, the light slides over his face, and reveals little to nothing.

Eugene doesn’t stick around to watch him leave, lingering on the porch like some widow. Snafu had told him that he parks his truck up in town, that he enjoys the wander down to the place that Eugene is staying. Eugene suspects he can’t enjoy the uphill walk back into Ambrose, but he may be projecting. Either way, he doesn’t stick around to find out. Just grabs the ashtray up from the table and slips inside, pulling the screen door flush behind him.

The late afternoon light is streaming in through the kitchen windows, pooling orange on the dark wood floors like something organic, something physical. Eugene imagines walking over and touching his fingers to the light, imagines his hands coming away sticky as though he’d touched honey. Instead, he skirts the puddles. Sets the glasses in the sink and runs the faucet to deal with the stickiness, and leaves them there. There’s a particular urgency stirring underneath his breastbone; one that belies the sleepiness he’d felt out on the porch. His eyelids still feel heavy, but as soon as he takes a seat at his desk it’s as though the tiredness gets snapped from him. Like pinging a rubber band, and watching the powdery coating disperse into the air. 

His novel has been stagnating since the insomnia started. But now, the taste of whiskey still thick in his mouth, the stickiness of sweat still coating his skin, Eugene feels a new energy. The house fills with the clattering of typewriter keys, only pausing every few minutes for him to rip the filled page of paper from the platen and replace it. The crank of the roller knob, the ding of the carriage return. Typos abound. Some such garbled mashes of letters he knows that later he’ll scratch his head over what word he could’ve possibly meant, but Eugene can’t spare a thought for it in that moment. His world narrows to forty-four black keys, the firm press of inked stamp to fresh page. His pulse beating in his ears, mirroring the noise of his fingers hitting the keys. Cigarette smoking away in the ashtray by his elbow, the thin black butts of Snafu’s cigarettes crumpled and littering the bottom.

That night, Eugene knows he’s due for another night of vivid dreams the minute he settles his head to the mattress. Unlike before, when his insomnia was in full swing, tiredness bolts him down to bed, and holds him there. Falling asleep these days is like dropping down into a long tunnel, blood rushing in his ears as his body lies still, as his brain narrows and narrows and then blooms. Eyes flickering behind his closed eyelids. 

A wolf waits for him in the glade of his mind. The dream is silent, and grainy, as though it’s been filtered twice through some outside source before being piped into Eugene’s head. The surroundings indistinct; a jungle one moment, a mass of grey concrete the next. Everything shifting with each turn of Eugene’s head, hyperaware of the wolf, the smell of a wet city in his nose. Its yellow eyes follow him. Eugene feels a dart of vague familiarity, which is snuffed out as soon as it comes. The picture wavers, bending like it does on Eugene’s ma’s TV set. He imagines banging on the top of it, and just like that the dream rights itself. Green dripping leaves. The ripe smell of his own sweat; Eugene’s clothes stiff with it. Dark earth and the sharp, acrid smell of broken foliage. 

Opposite him, the wolf’s lips draw back from its teeth. Fur bristling all along its back. When Eugene goes to take a step back, alarm rising up inside him like an arrow, he finds his feet stuck. A glance down shows boots sunk to their laces in sucking mud. A glance up shows the wolf lunging, teeth incredibly white against the deep red of its maw. 

Panic, like a fist around his lungs. Eugene feels the wolf make contact, feels the teeth sink into the muscle of his shoulder, feels its claws make ribbons of his side. The pain is pale, indistinct. He’s nothing but a rag doll, thrown into that mud and crushed beneath the weight of the creature. He feels just the impact of its blows, and little more. Like Eugene is wearing layers of heavy padding. But the wolf’s muzzle is wet with his blood, its pale eyes sharp and intelligent as it rears back, tongue lolling, chest heaving. Eugene can taste his own blood in his mouth. Sharp, coppery, sticking hard to the back of his tongue no matter how much he tries to swallow it down. The wolf’s huge paw is on his chest, making it hard to breathe, making it hard for his panic to hold fast. 

Eugene sucks in a desperate, bloody gasp of air. Smells whiskey, the sun-warmed paint that flakes easily from the railing of the porch. Smells cloves. 

He jerks awake to sunlight streaming through the window, so strong and so bright that he covers his eyes with a groan as it blinds him. The tatters of his dream swirl around him; with a shuddering breath, Eugene presses his palm to his chest. Finds it whole, unmarked. Bare and sweaty from sleep. Relief thumps through him, but then without panic he becomes aware of the feeling that had been lurking behind it.

He’s hard in his underwear. Dick resting heavy and insistent against the crease of his thigh. It’s a testament to just how out of it he is that Eugene’s first instinct is to touch himself, hips tipping up into his hand as he stares blankly up at the ceiling. The smell of those little black cigarettes. Under his hand, his dick twitches. 

—————

The dreams continue to morph and shift and change as the summer sweats on. By day, Eugene is tired, distracted, spending hours sat at his desk with the blank page staring back at him from his typewriter. He barely makes it up the hill into the town any more; too anxious to be away from his work in case a flash of inspiration shows itself to him. Sometimes Burgie drops by, and they smoke on the porch while Eugene scribbles ideas he’ll later scrap in his notebook, and Burgie does a crossword puzzle. His wife had picked him up a puzzle book in a gas station about a week ago. Sometimes Eugene just sits, and watches the slow, deliberate scratch of Burgie’s pencil to the pages. Lets his mind run down to a low buzz of activity. It’s a rare moment of rest for him. Ever since that dream a couple weeks ago, Eugene’s brain has felt switched on and aching all hours of the day. He feels burned out, overworked, with nothing to show for it but a healthy sleep cycle and dreams that fade to nothing in mere minutes after waking. 

Eugene falls asleep around ten, most nights. Sleeps heavy and deep and motionless for hours and hours, his brain taking over from his body until at last he wakes, ill-rested and sweating. Turned on, for the most part. His dreams oscillate between surreal and erotic so quickly that the two become one. Most mornings he grinds an orgasm out into the sheets before he’s even properly woken, still drunk on whatever he’d dreamed, still with one foot in the mire. When he wakes fully, he’s embarrassed for it, and vows to try and do something about it. He’s cut out coffee, milk, cheese. Cut out the beer he shares with Burgie on the nights they get together, cut out the whiskey he drinks alone with his blank page, waiting for inspiration to hit. But still the cycle begins the following night, without fail. 

Part of him knows that he should be happy for the sleep. Wasn’t it only a handful of weeks ago that he would’ve died for the kind of hours he gets now? But the nights leave him so exhausted it feels as though it negates the sleep. It’s as though someone’s come and knocked him unconscious, then coaxed him up out of it nine hours later.

He dreams of long tunnels leading to nowhere; daylight at the mouth but always out of reach. Dirt and rocks and mud under his hands and feet as he stumbles and crawls towards that always-distant circle of light. He dreams of pulling things from his skin; flowers, feathers, small unfurling shoots. He dreams of eyes on the very edges of his consciousness, some indistinct watcher that shifts between dog and man almost interchangeably. Stalking the copse of his mind. He dreams of hands reaching through his skin, breaching the surface tension to touch him where the light can’t see. Rings flashing by moonlight, cast adrift at sea, salt water burning his sinuses as he wakes from drowning. Dilapidated houses still standing only by force of will. Sitting shotgun in a car driven by a face he doesn’t remember. Hot earth, hot air, hot sunlight on his face. By the time he’s washed his face and drank his morning coffee, Eugene’s forgotten everything but these fleeting glimpses. 

The typewriter sits sullen and still on his desk. Staring balefully at Eugene as he rises through his fog of dreams. He can feel its presence in the house, an unhappy wife sulking in the bedroom. 

It’s around this time that two things happen. 

Burgie and Flo go out of town for the week, headed a few hours north to attend a funeral for a distant relative of Flo’s. Burgie leaves the dog with Eugene; both parties seemingly unhappy about the arrangement apart from Eugene, who’s delighted for the company and the distraction. He’s always been a dog lover, even if the dog in question regards Eugene with a disinterest bordering on distaste. It becomes a little unclear just who is looking after who by the sixth time Eugene calls out _Boomer!_ and the dog still doesn’t come.

Eugene spends his evenings on the porch with the dog, both of them laid out on the warm, dusty boards, enjoying that moment where the sun sinks behind the trees and the world becomes marginally cooler, and bluer. Fireflies like tiny lanterns drifting over the long grass of the front lawn. Boomer snaps at them when they get close, his tail thumping slowly against the ground as he watches them. Eugene has introduced whiskey back into his diet, once it had become clear that it wasn’t affecting his sleep for better or worse, and often settles a glass of it on his chest as he and dog doze. Boomer takes to sleeping on the sofa, leaving Eugene to his night full of dreams in the bedroom. Together, they exist in an easy sort of camaraderie that only grows when Eugene starts feeding the dog from the table. 

Four days after Burgie’s departure, the second thing happens. 

Eugene had gone about his regular evening routine. Type a sentence, crumple up the paper, slot a fresh sheet in. Repeat. Whiskey, then dinner. Another whiskey. Time on the porch with the dog, who likes to lie with his head hanging off the step and his eyes on the forest. Gathering shadows over itself as the sun sinks lower and lower. Another whiskey. Another hour wasted trying to force words out of his overworked brain. His head feels like an old sponge sometimes. His brain. Dried up and hard, every ounce of creativity wrung out over the pillow as his eyes flicker beneath his lids. All to be forgotten by the time he sits back at his typewriter in the morning. Then he brushes his teeth, and sleeps, and dreams dreams that he won’t remember. 

When Eugene wakes, it’s to dirt underfoot, and darkness. The whisper of trees. Deep dark pockets of shadow that he’d only seen from the distance of his porch before now. Pine needles, rich dark earth. When Eugene cranes his neck to try and see the sky beyond the thick canopy overhead, the moon flashes back at him, a slip of silver through the trees. 

His mind is blank. Not a flutter of emotion as he takes a shaky, confused step backwards, the heel of his foot sinking in the soft dirt. He’s nude. Skin so pale against the night that it seems to glow through the darkness. The moon trails him as Eugene turns, uncertain, eyes probing at the darkness as he tries to make sense of what’s going on. He still feels half-tangled in sleep, eyes slow and heavy in his face, his brain even worse off. 

_This is new_ , he thinks. Never has Eugene ever been a sleepwalker. And for a moment he doubts himself; swings his gaze around himself once more as he searches for — what? Spot the difference. What makes a dream a dream? But the dirt under his toes feels so real, and the smell of the woods so vivid. The warm night air, raising goosebumps on his arms and stirring his hair. He’s strayed from the path. If this was a dream, would he be feeling the sinking fear beginning to curdle his stomach? It’s so nauseating that it wakes him, shakes the very last cobwebs of sleep from his brain as a bubble of fearful adrenaline bursts inside him. 

It shakes him into action, or at least a kind of action. Too afraid to delve any deeper into the woods, Eugene turns in place, trying to work out which way lies the entrance he can see from the porch. All he’s met with is thick, dark forest; the uncaring moon his only light. And silence, the kind of silence you think can’t exist in the natural world. Padded cell silence. The silence of the grave. 

To his left, a twig snaps, and Eugene’s heart rockets so fast into his throat he almost chokes on it. He thinks of the dog’s howling that he hears late at night. He thinks of Burgie’s vague warnings to stay out of the woods, his wives’ tales. He thinks of white eyes hanging disembodied in the darkness not two feet away. Blind fish eyes. A world of teeth lingering just below. 

The forest seems to swirl, tilting and shifting as Eugene peers into the shadows that lie between the trees, breath coming short and sharp. Another twig snaps. His head is full of the smell of the forest, of crushed pine needles and rich black earth, churned up and made fragrant. And that begins to shift too. The smell becomes thicker, heavier, a strange sweet perfume like bruised and rotting fruit. Sweet, but just on the turn towards something disgusting. Eugene can barely stand it. Breathing shallow through his mouth to keep the smell from unscrewing his head clean off, eyes darting as he takes a few unsure steps in the direction he thinks may be right, but he feels so disorientated, so alien, so far from home — 

“Are you lost?”

Cloves. It’s cloves, the smell. Or at least, cloves if you had to describe the smell of it to a person who didn’t know. If you smoked cloves over the rotting mush of furry fruit. Pale eyes, the impenetrable blackness of the forest. Velvet like the shorn close hair on the back of a man’s head. Velvet like the fur that stands up along a dog’s back. Eugene wonders blindly if there’s any end to these woods, if they just go on and on forever, until you drop off the end of the world. 

“Are you lost?” 

It’s cloves if the plant grew on another planet. If it grew like rice in stagnant water. It’s cloves if you pressed your nose to the collar of a thurifer, and inhaled that thick church incense smell right alongside it. Something earthy and ancient and unfathomable, thin black cigarettes dipped in tar, dipped in wine, dipped in —

Hands on his bare shoulders. The world goes frighteningly, blissfully, still. Eugene’s brain quiets just enough to be invaded by the absolute silence that the woods hold, to be smoothed out by it. Green eyes drift through the darkness. The fear he feels is a pale imitation of what it had been, but it’s enough to raise the hair on the back of Eugene’s neck. Snafu. The undersides of his rings are cool against Eugene’s flesh. His face swims in and out of focus, as though Eugene is staring at him from the bottom of a swimming pool.

Again, that thought. _What makes a dream a dream?_

In the distance, a dog is barking. Snafu’s eyes are heavy lidded, pupils blown so big that his iris is nothing more than a thin green ring keeping that black in check. That Mona Lisa smile, that smile-that-isn’t-a-smile, that baring of teeth like a dog, like the creature between his nipples. When his hand skates lightly down Eugene’s bare side, it makes him shiver. Something like electricity blooming in its wake. 

“I’m lost,” Eugene manages, and his voice feels strange to him. Faraway, and small. He sways on his feet, eyes locked with Snafu’s as the other man’s hand finds his hip. This is how the rabbit feels, staring down the mouth of its predator. This is how the snake feels, prey to the charmer’s tune. He swallows, just as Snafu’s smile turns sharp.

“I don’t think you’re lost,” he murmurs. The tattoo on his chest seems to writhe. Eugene makes a noise in the back of his throat as Snafu cups at his dick, his hips tipping forward into the touch without his leave. “I think you’re exactly where you wanna be.”

Eugene is halfway to orgasm when he wakes for good. Curled around himself, his sheets a screwed up ball at the end of the bed. Dick so hard and aching against his belly that it’s second nature to touch it, to tug on it, and then Eugene is cumming and being yanked from his dream all at once, the side of his face pressed hard into his pillow as he groans and pants against it. Toes curling against the mattress, squeezing at himself to draw the feeling out until he’s shuddering all over with it. When he’s done, he stills. Eyes screwed tight just to keep reality out for one more minute, one more second —

The bedroom is hot; the fan having stilled at some point while he was dreaming. Eugene smears his hand against the bedsheet, nose wrinkled as he stares up at the ceiling and slowly becomes unwound from the tight ball he’d woken in. His second waking. Why is it that dreams never feel like dreams when you’re experiencing them? It’s a terrifying thought, one that takes his orgasm-high heart rate and raises it further. Is he going to wake again? In the same bed, in the same room. Or maybe not even that. Will he wake in Mobile one day, wake in the room he rents there to find it’s barely been eight hours since he fell asleep? Reality is unwinding, becoming thin, like a tight mesh pulled to reveal the holes. 

There’s mud in the sheets. On the soles of his feet. When Eugene paces on newborn legs into the kitchen a handful of minutes later, Boomer has his hackles up, growling through the screen door at empty air. 

Outside the window, the rushing noise of a hundred cicadas fills the air. 

—————

The Dream seems like a natural progression from what Eugene’s been experiencing ever since he’d set foot in Ambrose. It feels like the top of his head has been twisted off, his brain messed around with and then the whole thing sloppily put back together. Maybe there’s something in the drinking water. The Dream had been so vivid that Eugene could taste the air, can still feel the sense-memory of the ground under his bare feet. The feeling of moonlight on his skin. The cool metal of Snafu’s rings, the warmth of his palm —

Eugene spends his days feeling torn about it. His anxiety manifests as a perpetual stomach ache; he downs antacids like they’re candy, desperate to fix the nausea that feels as though it’s eating him up. The heat doesn’t help. He feels sick, and miserable, so highly strung he’s sure he’s about to snap. He thinks he’s going mad. He thinks he might be the only sane person here. 

“There’s somethin’ goin’ on with you,” Burgie says, eyeing him through cigarette smoke. It’s all Eugene can do to keep himself from laughing; near-hysterical at how Burgie’s words don’t even begin to cover it. 

If Ambrose is some hungry, maddening beast, Eugene’s Jonah in its belly. Helpless to its madness. Helpless to its horrible sucking heat. At night he sits on the porch and watches the forest like a hawk, fireflies rising from the grass, ice melting in his glass. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting to emerge from it, but can’t tear his eyes from it nonetheless. 

When he sleeps, it’s light, and fitful. His dreams feel odd and unfamiliar, the hand of another clear to see. They flicker through memories that aren’t his own, images that he’s never seen before in his life. Humid jungle and beaten track. Fat yellow candles flickering in some invisible draft, the glow of lamplight on dark water. Alligator eyes, reflecting it like headlights. A highway of teeth. Eugene starts thinking about strokes, about brain bleeds, about tumours and dementia and just plain madness. 

His typewriter hasn’t been touched since he’d woken from the forest, with mud and leaves dried and tangled up in his sheets. If Eugene concentrates, he can still remember the story as he’d intended it, though in the weeks that came before this bout of writers block, he’d altered the story beyond recognition. Those weeks of frenzied writing, of feeling as though his hands belonged to another. Thoughts spilling directly from his brain to the page, the act of typing a frustration because it slowed the pace of communication between head and paper. Now, he sits on the porch and for the first time he reads back his draft. Cigarette dangling from his lip, shedding ash onto the paper as he reads. Whiskey at his elbow. Forest just in his line of sight.

“I’d love to read it some time,” Burgie says, one evening that they spend together. Eugene is sat on the floor, back to the railings as he smokes and flicks through the stack of papers in his lap. 

Eugene grunts. “Not much to see.” His eyes feel hot and dry with tiredness. The dreams have been scaring him, with all their unknown lands and unfamiliar sights and sounds. It means sleep is something to avoid once more. Any vague pleasure he’d been able to find in the vivid dreaming is now long gone. Sometimes, Eugene feels very much like he’s being forced to watch a slideshow from a stranger’s vacation. _Here is a country you’ve never seen. Here is how a stomach looks after a bayonet has been taken to it. Here is an old woman, a young man, a squalling baby in a bassinet._

He scrubs his hand over his face. When he drops it, it’s to find Burgie looking at him with true concern on his face. He’s even taken his cap off. It’s being worried between his hands in his lap, faded from the sun and frayed with age. Burgie’s forehead now has a pink line bisecting it. Eugene almost laughs. It’s how he imagines his head must’ve looked after it had been opened up and altered.

“Are you okay?” Burgie asks, and his voice is so thick with worry that a wave of exhaustion crashes over Eugene. He lets the page he’d been running his eyes over join the pile in his lap, and slumps against the railings. At his back, the forest seems to seethe.

What was it that Snafu had said? _Ain’t everythin’ got a pulse?_ It feels so real that Eugene finds it hard to doubt. 

“I’ve been havin’ a lot of dreams,” Eugene mutters, closing his aching eyes as he lets his head drop back. He groans, and then admits, “I just ain’t feelin’ right.”

It’s not even the half of it, but Eugene doesn’t have the energy to expand on it. Burgie would probably think him mad anyway. 

“Them sleepin’ pills are still on offer,” Burgie reminds him. Eugene doesn’t know how to tell him that it’s being asleep that is the problem. Ever since The Dream, Eugene hasn’t been able to shake his anxiety about it. It worries him that he could’ve dreamt that up, but it frightens him to think that he didn’t.

“I think I need somethin’ that’d do the opposite,” Eugene mumbles, wryly. Burgie is silent for a long, dragging beat, but then he snorts, and the chair creaks as he leans back in it.

“They used to drug us durin’ the war,” he says. His voice is soft, and low. Eugene opens one eye just to read his expression. Burgie’s frowning down at his lap, at the cigarette he’s beginning to roll there. “To keep us awake.” He shakes his head, eyes faraway as he licks at the cigarette paper. Then he snorts, though there’s no humour in it. “Jesus, the things we would’ve done for some sleep.”

“What was it?” Eugene asks, quietly. Burgie lights his cigarette, and takes a puff, the smoke clouding his face for a second.

“Dexedrine. Used to be for women to lose weight.” Here, he laughs. “Worked like hell on us, anyway.”

“Dexedrine,” Eugene repeats, watching the end of Burgie’s cigarette burn as he draws on it. Something passes over his face; a frown, a dark memory. His eyes tighten right along with his mouth.

“You don’t wanna go down that road,” he says. “There’s nothin’ in this world worse than being kept awake like that.” He gestures upwards, towards his head. “Used to get this feelin’ like my brain was zappin’ ‘cause I was so tired. Then I’d lay down to sleep and stare at the wire for hours instead.” He pauses to take a drag from his cigarette. Eugene is silently weighing the pros and cons in his head. “There was a guy in my platoon, he got a section eight because of it. Went nuts, took his ka-bar to himself and all.” He makes a weary noise. “You don’t even know. Shit.”

Eugene doesn’t respond, just drops his eyes back to the abandoned draft in front of him, and leafs uselessly through it. His eyes are blurry, unable to focus on the printed word. All he can think of is madness. Which is the worse one? To sleep, or not to sleep — that is the question. At nighttime he stands in front of the bathroom mirror and peers at his reflection, pushing his hair back to look at his scalp. He doesn’t know what he expects to see there. Maybe it’d be a comfort to find that he was growing something malignant under his skull, just to have a reasonable explanation for everything that’s happening. 

He hasn’t dreamed of Snafu since the night of The Dream, but dreads a repeat. It wasn’t the sexual nature of it, not really. Not when far stranger dreams have him waking confused and aroused. He’s attracted to the man. It stands to reason that would come through in his odd dreaming; everything else seems to. No, it was something hard to identify that made that dream so particularly disquieting. Snafu had seemed too — too solid. Too multidimensional, too _real_. Like he pumped blood, breathed air, had real thoughts ticking through his head. Every other figure that Eugene dreams of — parents, friends, past boyfriends — have a strange, shiny artificiality to them. Like he could pass his hand through them. But not dream-Snafu. He looked just as real as he had standing in Eugene’s kitchen. He had felt just as real too. 

The Dexedrine lingers in the back of Eugene’s mind for a day or so, before he dismisses it. The story about Burgie’s platoon-mate is disquieting; for some reason Eugene finds himself turning it over in his mind at strange, quiet hours of the day. When he’s making a cup of coffee. When he’s smoking a cigarette in front of his typewriter. Ambrose is driving him to a particular kind of upset that he’s never felt before, but still the idea of self-harm makes him recoil. He supposes it must be a good sign. When the day comes where he feels like that’s the only fix for what is haunting him, Eugene will know it’s time to relent. 

He doesn’t tell Burgie about his dreams, still. The same mental block that had forced Eugene to keep his question about Snafu to himself seems to be at play here. It’s somewhat about his own fears of looking completely paranoid and mad in front of Burgie, but also about something else entirely. Something that he can’t identify for the life of him.

At night, his mind still shows him the slideshow of what he can only say is someone else’s life. In fact, they get more frequent as the days go on. Sometimes he wakes only to slip right back into it, like they’re a movie playing uninterrupted on the insides of his eyelids. There’s no escaping. 

Innocuous things, and less innocuous things. Blood on dark earth, the play of lamplight on wooden walls. Some nights, Eugene sees himself. And he knows its himself, while at the same time not feeling much connection to the shape in front of him at all. Sometimes he’s a shadow, just a black shape against flat black darkness. Sometimes he’s twisted, re-made, a Picasso-like Frankenstein’s monster. Inside-out, upside-down. Still, himself. Those dreams always feel voyeuristic; as though he’s watching through a pair of eyes that aren’t his own. It’s a strange sort of duality, to be the watched and the watcher. Sometimes when Eugene passes a mirror, he flinches, expecting to see himself from that strange, detached place that only exists in his dreams. 

He knows it means something, but can’t figure out just what. For a few afternoons, he begins writing down what he remembers; those snatches of memory, of disconnected fragmentary visuals and vivid touch and smell. Sat at his typewriter with that deep heavy sunlight pooling in from the west-facing windows, a cigarette turning the small room blue as he loses himself to the rhythmic clatter of the keys. Later, he’ll observe the way the setting sun stains the undersides of the clouds a deep orange, and feel a stirring of inspiration in him for the first time in a long time. _If this is all a dream,_ he thinks, _at least it’s a pretty one._

That night he dreams of waking on the porch, under the pale blue roof. It’s a familiar dream, and a familiar waking-memory too. The setting sun, the warmth of it on the side of his face. The sheen of sweat blanketing him, making Eugene feel so intrinsically sticky he knows that even a shower wouldn’t fix it. Without having to look, he knows that there’s an empty glass by his hip. The ashtray must sit beyond that. It’s like someone had examined how he’s spent every night since his arrival, and pulled an average picture from it. He can even smell cloves.

“You know what they call this shade of blue?” a voice asks, that deep languid accent curling through the words. When Eugene opens his eyes, it’s to find Snafu laid out parallel to him, hands folded on his chest and eyes upturned towards the roof. Eugene knows that this must be a dream by the complete lack of surprise he feels at the man’s sudden presence. Instead, his eyes just follow Snafu’s, fixing on the roof above them.

“I don’t,” he murmurs, attention caught by the flutter of an old cobweb. There’s no breeze to stir his hair, or to stir the smoke from the cigarette in Snafu’s clasped hands. 

“Haint blue,” Snafu replies, as Eugene wonders vaguely after what force could make the cobweb flutter. “There’s an old superstition that it’ll ward off evil spirits who wanna get into your home.”

Eugene hums. The cobweb has stilled. “Do you believe in superstitions?” he asks. There’s a strange quality to this conversation. As though someone has drawn the conversation out on a punchcard and fed it into his mouth. 

There’s a long silence. Eugene hears the rasp of Snafu’s cigarette burning as he takes a drag from it, then the sound of his exhale. The spicy, sweet smell of cloves fogs the air above them, and then Snafu speaks. “I am one,” he says, carelessly. When Eugene rolls his head to the side, the man is looking at him already. His eyes huge and searching, the late afternoon light caressing the planes of his face. The delicate arch of his top lip shines with sweat. 

“You are one,” Eugene echoes, and thinks about tasting the salt on his lip. He’s not shocked. Why is he not shocked?

Snafu laughs low in his throat. Eugene watches the thin black cigarette drift to his mouth. Watches him take a drag, watches the smoke curl from his mouth. Shot through with the low afternoon sun, it looks like gold made formless. Like if Eugene put his hand through it, it’d emerge sticky. Drops of it clinging to the hairs on his wrists. He almost tries it out — after all, is this not a dream? But somehow he knows that he’s not the one in control here. This isn’t from his own brain; the laws of physics won’t work how he’d like them to. It’s subtle, but he can feel it. There’s something off about the scene, but it’s something so small he can’t put a finger on it. Spot the difference. Eugene thinks he’s been living in that margin between the images for a very long time.

“So the paint doesn’t work,” he mumbles, and pulls his eyes from the side of Snafu’s face. It’s not easy. It’s like the whole world narrows to the man; some forced focal point, with the sun in his eyes and in his teeth as he grins. 

“I ain’t evil,” Snafu replies. The world rings with silence. “And I ain’t a spirit.” He thumps his free hand to his chest; open-handed, right over where Eugene knows the tattoo lurks beneath his t-shirt. “Flesh and blood. Ain’t that obvious?”

Dryly, Eugene laughs. “Ain’t nothin’ obvious anymore.”

Snafu makes a noise at that, something amused. If this wasn’t a dream, Eugene knows his mind would be racing…but then, would it? Second guessing is second nature to him now. The real world seems delicate, distant. Snafu feels so real next to him that he seems to glow, inside and out. Bending the air so that Eugene can sense him even with his eyes back on the roof above them. He hadn’t done that in the real world. Eugene remembers sweating into the sofa, the smell of that black cigarette, _tobacco, other stuff_ , Snafu’s presence such a void that he’d scared Eugene —

“I made this place for you.” Snafu says, suddenly. When Eugene tries to sit up to look at him, he finds himself bound fast to the boards. All he can do is turn his head, and meet Snafu’s curious eyes. “Do you like it?” he adds, in the same way a child would ask their parent. 

Eugene stares at him. How strange. _When?_ he wants to ask. _Why?_ But the punchcard is running through him, and all that comes out of his mouth is, “There’s somethin’ off ‘bout it.” It’s not a lie. In the same way that Snafu looks too real, the rest of the world looks slightly off-kilter, and artificial. The leaves on the bushes that line the porch don’t catch the sunlight properly. The cobweb on the roof is still, though a breeze is stirring Snafu’s cigarette smoke now. The sky is too blue. The grass too green. Everything looks as though it’s been sprouted from the same thing; a giant malleable piece of dough. 

“What is it?” Snafu asks, and Eugene hums.

“There ain’t no sounds,” he settles on. It’s the strangest thing of them all. Besides them, and besides Snafu’s cigarette, the dream is silent. It doesn’t even have that ringing noise that comes with true silence in the real world. Eugene glances to Snafu to try and gauge his reaction, and is dimly surprised to find him grinning up at the roof. 

“Funny,” he says. “Got my eardrum blown out in ‘Nam.” Here, he taps his left ear. “Guess I forgot how loud things are.”

If Eugene listens closely, he can hear it. The faint call of a bird. The whisper of trees. There’s so many questions clamouring at his mouth that he can’t choose one, and instead just asks, “Why shouldn’t I believe this is just a weird dream?” and watches Snafu’s eyes curve in amusement.

“Nothin’ to say it ain’t,” he says. The cigarette drifts back to his mouth as he throws Eugene an impish, sidelong glance. “You think somethin’ being a dream makes it less real?” 

Eugene tries again to sit up, and again is held tight to the boards. “You’re a handyman.”

A smile is dancing around Snafu’s mouth. “Am I?”

Eugene thinks of Snafu’s broad, warm palm on the bare skin of his hip. That dream had felt so real that Eugene has a difficult time thinking about it. More so than all the surreal, semi-erotic dreams his brain has been feeding him for weeks. “Are you real?” he asks, and that makes Snafu’s smile grow. Teeth bared to the sunlight, which doesn’t shift, doesn’t change. Somehow Eugene knows that they could lie here like this for hours, and the sun would stay as still as them.

“I’m as real as you are.”

A beat of silence. The questions are bubbling up endlessly in Eugene’s chest; he thinks they could lie here for days and he wouldn’t tire. And he’s sure he’d never get the answers he wants either. “That night in the woods —” he begins, and then stops. Snafu’s smile is toothy. “It felt so real.”

Snafu sits up. Eugene, shocked at his freedom, just blinks at him. Snafu is haloed by the low sun, his face thrown into indistinct shadow. “How many times have I gotta say it?” he asks, and Eugene just stares guilelessly at him. “Just ‘cause somethin’ happens in a dream, don’t mean it ain’t real.” The boards creak under Snafu’s weight as he leans across the foot of space between their bodies, and Eugene feels himself go limp as the movement shifts Snafu’s scent towards him. Cloves, if somebody had made it into a heady, intimate perfume, and applied it solely to the parts of the body where the pulse beats the hardest. Warm, rich, indelicate. 

“Are you gonna kiss me?” he breathes, and watches Snafu’s eyes crinkle with amusement. 

Snafu’s voice is low when he replies. “I ain’t makin’ any more moves,” he says. “You’ve gotta make that choice now, Gene.”

Eugene moves his hand to cup Snafu’s jaw without even realising he’s been released from whatever bind the dream had him in, and once his fingers touch Snafu’s skin, the man melts. Eugene’s mouth finding his unerringly, the kind of perfection that can only exist in dreams. And it feels — well, Eugene is sick of trying to delineate real from fake any longer. Snafu’s mouth is soft and gentle against his own, the two of them relaxed into each other, trading open-mouthed kisses under the burning eye of that motionless sun. _Image two_ , Eugene thinks, or maybe he’s in another image entirely. Alice through the looking glass. Enchanted, bewitched, drunk on Snafu’s mouth and his touch. Would it really be so bad, to have gone mad? 

—————

Sometimes Ambrose feels like the burning centre of the universe. Like all roads lead to it, like it has some sort of unexplainable magnetic pull. Eugene sits down on the sofa one evening, glass of whiskey and an idle cigarette, and flicks through the phonebook while he waits for his dinner to cook. Chicken breasts, in the oven. He only has a vague idea of what he’s gonna do with them once they’re out. 

Thumbing through the thin pages, it’s more for the action rather than the fact that he’s actually looking. Paper whispering in the quiet room, long shadows creeping across the wooden floors as the sun gives over to the pale purple evening outside. Eugene’s mind is busy with thoughts of sleep, as it has been since his dream a few nights previous. How to get more of it. How to sleep better. How to exist in that hazy changeable world with its sticky static sun for seconds, minutes, _hours_ more. Then an image flashes past him, the old paper falling before he can really see it, and Eugene tears a couple pages in his haste to find it once more. 

A thickly lashed eye, _Mystic_ emblazoned above it in curling font. As Eugene stares, he swears it blinks. _Ambrose, LA, invites you to uncover the secrets of your dreams_. The very ad he’d clipped from the yellow pages, god — almost a year ago, now. Tucked innocently away in this phonebook he’d been using as a coaster since he’d arrived. He always assumed it was an old ad; he’d found it while searching through his mom’s yellow pages while home for the weekend. Searching for a gardener, finding instead something that made him so sharply curious and inspired that he hadn’t been able to leave it in the book. Eugene tears this one out too, and compares it to the dogeared, folded-up version from the depths of his wallet. Identical, though the eye is demure and half-lidded in the one pulled from his wallet. 

“Spot the difference,” he mutters, wildly, and then laughs. Had the eye always been half closed? 

Do you see it? The way that everything seems set to pull him into Ambrose’s clutch?

Sometimes Eugene feels so spun out and disconnected from the rest of the world that the house feels like a boat, adrift at sea. Isolation, if isolation can be pleasurable. That mile of dirt track between the house and Ambrose’s square is nothing but a thin thread anchoring him there. When night falls so dark that Eugene can barely see his hand in front of his face, that thread disappears, and he drifts. 

Tonight, ringed hands crack Eugene’s ribs apart and reach into the viscera the bone protects. It’s a kind of foreplay. But when he wakes it’s to sunlight and an empty room; if Eugene closes his eyes tight enough, everything disappears but him. The weight of his body against the mattress. The rush of his thoughts. The fan turns slowly overhead, shifting hot air around the room. He imagines this house on the edge of town blinking out of existence, then shimmering back into place once he opens his eyes to watch the fan beat ineffectually over him. It feels less lonely with his eyes screwed shut. The way that Snafu touches Eugene in his dreams makes all other touch seem pale in comparison.

Despite the warm room, his body is prickled with goosebumps. For a minute, Eugene lies there and wonders what had woken him. Hand pressed to his sternum, fingers pressing and massaging at the skin to feel the sweep of bone underneath. Days have smeared into mush. He’s not sure how long it’s been since that dream with Snafu on the porch. Eugene eats when he’s hungry, he drinks when he’s thirsty. Showers, when it feels like he’s been sweating away in Ambrose’s sticky heat for too long. His manuscript sits dog-eared and lonely on his desk, next to his neglected typewriter. Every few days he manages to affix himself to the chair and do some writing, but the urge has disappeared. Writing is purely mechanical now. Eugene can barely remember the end of the novel that he’d been so excitedly rushing towards; it had been a twist, he knows that much. A twist from what? He doesn’t know.

He’s toeing the edge of sleep again. Can almost feel the heat of Snafu’s palm testing against his breastbone. Sticky and warm with sweat. That quiet world with its static sun. Eugene had unearthed a hag stone from a drawer of his desk the other night. It now sits on his windowsill, black and smooth, polished from the passing of years of fingers over its surface. How had it gotten there?

The screen door rattles, and Eugene lurches up and out of sleep.

Burgie’s voice, heavy footsteps. “Gene, if you’re dead, I’ll be really mad!” 

Reflexively, Eugene grabs for the sheet, abandoned and half-puddled on the floor, and pulls it over himself just as Burgie appears in the open doorway. He’s pink-faced, and cap-less, those serious dark brows of his beetled in disapproval as he points at Eugene and says, “I haven’t seen you for a week.”

Shocked by the sudden confrontation, Eugene can’t make a sound. He’s still drunk on his dream, still half-asleep and bleary, trying hard to make his brain to connect to his mouth in an attempt to get Burgie to stop glaring like that. “What?” he croaks, finally. The fan is motionless overhead. The air in the room hot and thick in its stillness. “What do you mean?”

Burgie’s face has softened, incrementally. “Are you sick?” he asks, hand going unconsciously for the row of switches on the wall. He flicks one, and then frowns, eyes going up to the ceiling. “Is that fan broken? It’s boiling in here.”

 _Snafu fixed it,_ Eugene almost says, but again feels that staying hand on his vocal cords. Instead, he murmurs, “I’m not sick,” and watches Burgie’s eyes slide warily back to him.

From Eugene’s sporadic glances of himself in the mirror, he knows he doesn’t look so good. Despite the fact that he’s getting a good ten hours of sleep each night, his eyes are red-rimmed, and puffy. Lips chapped, hair wild either from sleeping with it wet or from not washing it at all. If the dreams had been exhausting his mind before, they’re doing more than that now. Just as Eugene would wake feeling like his brain had never switched off, now he wakes feeling as though he’s run a marathon. With Burgie’s probing gaze on him, Eugene feels even more worse for wear.

“You look sick,” Burgie decides, after a beat. Eugene lifts a shoulder in response. He can’t argue with that. Then Burgie gestures, and approaches the bed, sensible as ever as he adds, “C’mon, have a shower and I’ll cook you somethin’.”

Burgie chivvies Eugene out of bed and shuts him in the bathroom with orders to not come out until he’s clean. Once inside, Eugene lingers for a second, back to the door and his eyes on his own reflection. It seems just a beat behind him, like there’s some strange lag. When he lifts his arm, the reflection copies him a half-second later. 

_Has it really been a week?_ he thinks, his reflection looking startled and wall-eyed, pale in the bathroom light. He’d last gone out to buy a carton of eggs, and some vegetables. He and Burgie had chatted about Flo’s upcoming birthday. In the carton there had been four brown eggs, and two white. It feels like it had happened only days ago. 

“I don’t hear showering!” Burgie yells, his voice carrying through from the kitchen, snapping Eugene back to reality, and into action. 

There’s a plate of eggs waiting on the kitchen table when Eugene emerges, hair wet and dripping water into the collar of the t-shirt he’d thrown on. A slice of thickly buttered toast sits next to the eggs; a cup of coffee to round it out. At the sight of the food, steam rising off it and catching in the sunlight, Eugene’s stomach growls.

“You really didn’t have to cook for me,” he says, sliding into the seat and digging into the food immediately despite his protests. Burgie, who is stood scrubbing a pan in the sink, snorts humourlessly. The sound barely carries over the sound of running water. 

“Apparently I do.”

Eugene’s too busy eating to argue. He hadn’t felt hungry when he’d woken, or when he’d been stood under the cold spray of the shower, but now it feels like his body has finally woken up. His back aches, his stomach aches. His eyes feel hot and gritty, his head pounding with a dehydration headache his coffee won’t solve. Maybe he is sick? Outside of sleep he’s felt disconnected and dreamy, always waiting for the sun to set so he can climb back into bed with no guilt. Compared to what happens behind his closed eyes, his days feel dull and slow. It wouldn’t be a far stretch to think that he’s been so out of it that he hasn’t noticed himself coming down with a summer flu. 

Burgie sets the soapy dishes on the rack to dry, and wipes his hands on his jeans as he comes to take a seat at the table. He hasn’t made himself any food. Something about that, and the quality of light on the dark floors, prompts Eugene into asking, “What time is it?” And then, “What day is it?” follows hot on its heels.

Burgie raises his brows, and looks away. “Past noon, Wednesday the 16th,” he says, and glances back to see Eugene’s reaction. “Yeah, so you see why I’m worried.”

One week, and four days. Jesus. Is it ridiculous that Eugene’s mind goes straight to the crisper, full of undoubtedly rotten vegetables now? He slows in his eating, setting the fork down carefully as he tries to track back in his own head, tries to account for the way time has slid right past him. Through the open windows, he can hear a catbird singing. That distinctive halting, mewing song. This is reality, he knows it. The real world has Burgie in it; solid and steadfast and preternaturally sensible. So how long has he been disconnected from it?

Burgie doesn’t wait on a reply. Instead he settles back in his chair with a sigh, hand going to the breast pocket of his shirt, to the pouch of tobacco and the thin fold of papers in there. “We’re friends, right?” he asks. His fingers are quick and sure as he rolls a cigarette, and then fishes a matchbook from his pocket to light it. Eugene watches him whip the match through, a sleepy eye emblazoned on the cheap cardboard of the book, half-marred by time. 

“Sure,” Eugene answers, a beat too late.

The flame catches on the end of Burgie’s smoke, and flares, licking up the paper. He puffs on it, shaking the match until the flame dies and smoke rises from it. “Then tell me,” he says, mumbled around his cigarette. “What’s going on with you?”

“I —” Eugene’s voice trembles. “I don’t know.”

Burgie continues, as if Eugene had never spoken. “Because a month ago you couldn’t sleep, and you were actin’ crazy. Now you _can_ sleep, and you’re actin’ crazier.” He jabs his cigarette in Eugene’s direction, brows bunched together in an expression that toes the line neatly between concern and frustration. “The place is a mess, you look a mess, and don’t think I haven’t noticed that the pilot light is still out —”

Eugene’s eyes dart towards the stove. “The pilot light?” he asks, lips numb. He thinks of Snafu’s grin, that one that shows his eyeteeth. _Done_ , the flick of the tiny blue flame. _See?_

“ — Which I forgot about too so I ain’t annoyed but it feels like whenever I see you, your head’s off somewhere that your body ain’t.” Here he pauses, and takes a drag from his cigarette. Eugene watches the cherry flare, his mind strangely blank. “Then you come into the shop askin’ after my sleepin’ pills, tellin’ me you’ve scrapped your book —” Burgie huffs, and shrugs. “— And I don’t see you for a week and a half.”

Silence. The catbird is calling again. It’s so hot outside that the sunlight thrown on the floor shimmers with its shadow. Like when Eugene stands himself right in the centre of the dirt track that leads into Ambrose, and turns his face towards the town. That magnetic pull. The horizon wavy with the heat that Eugene’s sure he’s never gonna learn how to tolerate. Across the table, Burgie shifts, the chair creaking under his weight and drawing Eugene’s attention. His eyes skip over Burgie’s set, serious face. Broad, and warm; friendly blue eyes. He’s hard to lie to. 

“I told you that I scrapped my book?” he asks, and doesn’t miss the way Burgie’s expression dips further into concern. 

“What,” he mutters, “You don’t remember?” 

Eugene pushes his plate away from him, his appetite gone. His stomach feels like it’s been squeezed up, twisted and knotted. Past noon, Jesus. And the worst thing is, he’s sitting here trying to think of what to say to Burgie that would get him to leave. Eugene’s bed calls, that sweaty tangle of sheets. 

“I haven’t,” he says, and then, twisting in his chair, he peers back down the hallway towards the bedroom. As if he’d be able to spot the desk from here. “It’s all next to my typewriter, I was working on it last night.”

Burgie huffs, and then rises to fetch the ashtray from the coffee table. A couple butts roll around in the bottom of it, and Eugene feels himself come over all clammy as he spots the little black ends of a kretek amongst his own. Burgie doesn’t notice. Just nudges the growing pillar of ash against the side, and says, “Y’know, Flo told me to leave you be. Said you writers actin’ weird is nearly normal.” He shakes his head, cigarette back in his mouth. 

“Thanks for checkin’ on me, but I’m okay,” Eugene says, and picks up his fork again to push the scrambled eggs around the plate. His stomach protests the vague idea to finish them, just to try and convince Burgie that he’s fine. It’s probably already a little too late for that. “I’ve just been —” he hesitates. The black surface of his coffee is catching the light from outside. Trees in his mug, the forest always watching. “I’ve been sleepin’ a lot,” he settles on. “Catchin’ up for lost time, I guess.” He forces a laugh. 

When Eugene glances up, Burgie is still watching him shrewdly. “You plannin’ on rentin’ this place another month, Gene?” 

Eugene blinks at him, teetering on the edge of a reflexive _yes!_ He hasn’t thought about it. He hasn’t thought about much of anything, lately. God, did he really ask Burgie for sleeping pills?

“I don’t know,” Eugene says. He reaches for his coffee, just to have something to cover his face for a second as he takes a drink. “I told myself I was gonna stay here until I finished my first draft. No matter how long it takes.” Burgie makes a noise at that. Disapproval, maybe. Eugene frowns at it, and asks, “What?”

Burgie doesn’t soften his words. “This place is disagreein’ with you.”

“How d’you figure that?” Eugene asks, immediately defensive. Like it hadn’t been Burgie who’d planted the seed of knowledge that had bloomed into — _this_. If Burgie had never filled his head with wives’-tales-that-weren’t-wives’-tales, would he even be here? Or would he be home, in Alabama, none the wiser about witches and dreams? It hurts his head to think about. 

“You ain’t been right for a while,” Burgie’s saying, and the knowledge that he’s coming from a place of concern isn’t quite enough for Eugene. He bristles, and Burgie sees it; raises an eyebrow. “What? You think you haven’t been havin’ a hard time?” 

“Insomnia is difficult,” Eugene mutters, petulant without meaning to be. “Writin’ a book is difficult.”

Burgie nods, frustrated, eyes sliding away to fix on the forest through the window. “Okay,” he mutters. “You’re grown, I see it. I ain’t gonna tell you what to do.”

They sit in uncomfortable silence for a long, dragging minute. Eugene drinks more of his coffee, face screwed up at how strong and black it is. Burgie finishes his cigarette, and lights another, that curious matchbook emerging from his pocket again. The smoke from it catches the early afternoon sunlight, becomes gold dust hanging in the still air. Eugene is reminded of his dream, Snafu’s cigarette smoke, the urge to pass his hands through the cloud to emerge sticky with dew. For the first time, annoyance niggles in his chest. He was just about to slip back into that sensual dream when Burgie had barged in and driven him out of bed. If it wasn’t for him, Eugene could still be asleep, revelling in that rosy world behind his eyelids. 

Soured, Eugene sets his coffee down. “I need to get to writin’.” It’s a good excuse, and one he’s used countless times to get out of various awkward social interactions. However Burgie seems to see right through it immediately, judging by the way he flicks his eyes to Eugene’s, and snorts.

“Get back to writin’ the scrapped book, huh?” His elbow rests along the back of the kitchen chair, cigarette dangling from his fingers. Eugene watches him take a drag, annoyance uncurling in him. 

“Yeah, exactly that,” Eugene snaps. Burgie’s eyebrows raise.

“No need for that,” he says, and leans across the table to stub his cigarette out. “I’m here ‘cause I’m worryin’ after you.”

Eugene thinks about the pack of cigarettes in his room. He thinks about the hag stone on the sill, the sunlight behind throwing a tiny dot of light through it. “There’s nothin’ to worry about.”

Burgie looks at him for a minute longer, eyes shrewd and searching as they flick over Eugene’s face, and then away. He sighs. “Fine,” he says, and stands. “You’re a big boy, I’m sure you know what you’re doin’.”

Eugene watches him cross the room, watches him pause in the doorway. There’s something thick and unsaid hanging between them, and despite Eugene’s irritation, he feels a strange curl of desperation go through him. _Stop!_ he wants to shout, but then that feeling fades as fast as it’d come. The fingers clutched around his vocal cords, transferred now to the brain. 

Standing in the puddle of sunlight thrown through the thin mesh of the screen door, Burgie shuffles his feet, glances back over his shoulder. “You know where I am,” he says, voice careful and soft. “Come find me when you’re ready.”

Eugene wonders how he looks to Burgie. Wonders what the other man is thinking — whether he _knows_ , whether Eugene isn’t the first person he’s seen seized by sleep — but then the screen bangs and that puddle of sunlight seems to ripple with Burgie’s step from it. 

A minute later, Eugene hears the truck start. He can see the cloud of dust it kicks up in his mind’s eye, hanging still like smoke, like gold-dust, like a veil, shifted. 

Eugene goes to the bedroom as soon as he can’t hear the tires of the truck any longer. The coffee has made him jittery; hands shaky as he shoves aside balled-up papers and looseleaf notebooks, pulling the familiar heft of his manuscript from the mess on his desk with a triumphant noise. _A-ha!_ He knew he hadn’t scrapped it. Why would he? A quick leaf through shows all the pages there where they had been the last time he’d looked — the story trailing off abruptly around the three-hundredth page. Just looking at it makes Eugene feel exhausted. 

Why had he told Burgie that he’d scrapped it? Why can’t he remember the exchange at all? Did it happen on the same day as the vegetables, the talk of Flo’s birthday, four brown eggs and two white? The questions are racing around Eugene’s head quicker than he can even begin to find answers for them; with a groan he flops back on the bed, and presses his hands over his face. Reality feels so sticky and malleable that Eugene almost feels as though he could peel it away from itself, like spooning honeycomb from a hive. The buzzing of displaced bees in his ears. Again, for the first time in a little while, Eugene’s mind turns towards darker things. Would he know a bleed in his brain before he died from it? 

He feels like he’s taken Ambrose’s madness, and internalised it. Let it burn quick as wildfire through him. Jesus, he thinks the handyman is manipulating his dreams. Two nights ago he’d breathed, _can I fuck you here?_ right into the shell of Snafu’s ear, and the following laughter had sounded so dryly amused that it couldn’t be anything but real. How could his brain make up these things? He’s never heard Snafu laugh like that, has never seen Snafu nude, has never smelled his hair or tasted the skin of his hip. So how can his mind conjure those images up? It doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes sense anymore. 

Did Burgie give him the pills? That’s the most pressing question of them all. 

He almost wants to head back into town, to catch Burgie as he arrives and ask him, but doesn’t want to draw any more attention to his forgetfulness. Instead, Eugene turns the house near upside down in search of them; the bathroom cabinet, the drawers of his desk, his nightstand. His search is futile, and Eugene shocks himself with the wave of disappointment that goes through him when he realises it. No sleeping pills, the rest of the day stretching sunlit and never-ending in front of him. The waking world feels dull to him now. Distant and flat compared to the vibrancy of his dreams. The thought of having to face it having been jerked from sleep is unpleasant.

It’s only later that Eugene settles enough to feel concern about the reflexive way in which he’d searched for the pills. Since when has he enjoyed the affects of sleeping medication? He’s been feeling unlike himself for weeks, but this is the first clear sign of it that he can recall. It makes him uneasy for the rest of the day, rattling aimlessly around the house as his mind swings between justifying his search for the pills and worrying after it. 

At night, Snafu waits for him, clinging to the edges of Eugene’s consciousness as he drowses. He can feel him there, a presence that the man doesn’t have when he’s flesh and blood, only when he’s a figment in Eugene’s mind. Waiting, watching until sleep comes, just as it always does. And Snafu comes right along with it.

————

They’re lying in a field, together. Hip-high grass all around them, moving like the ocean in the soft breeze. It brings the smell of wildflowers, fresh air, a blooming world. Snafu’s fingers are in Eugene’s mouth. He tastes like salt, and skin; fleshy and overwhelmingly human when Eugene bites down.

“Wanted you the moment I saw you,” he’s saying, his accent thick and drawling as he rocks himself in Eugene’s lap. “When I saw you move in, when I heard your voice for the first time.” His breath catches in his throat as Eugene grips hard at his waist, pulling Snafu closer to him, desperate to sink into him, to kiss him, taste him. He wants to forget where his body ends and Snafu’s begins, wants to press his face into the man’s hair and keep the smell of him forever.

Snafu’s fingers slip from Eugene’s mouth, and move to splay spit-wet against his cheek. Mouth freed, Eugene murmurs, “Wanted you too.” Urgently, his voice low and heavy with pleasure. Snafu’s wet in his lap, so wet that Eugene feels soaked too. His stomach, his thighs, his balls. Around them, the grasses sway, the two of them moving together in their own private world of green. The noise of skin on skin, the susurration of the grasses, of Snafu’s moans and both of their breathing. The sun hangs static and indistinct overhead. Eugene doesn’t know how long they’ve been at this, doesn’t know how many hours have passed since he’d first kissed Snafu, since Snafu had coaxed Eugene’s hand between his legs. The shadows don’t grow long, the light doesn’t colour and fade. Dimly, he wonders if there’s a reason why the dreams that Snafu conjures up for him have no passage of time. But the thought takes a backseat to Snafu’s fingers clutching in Eugene’s hair. Grinding the fat swell of his dick against Eugene’s pelvis as he cums, and Eugene’s lap grows wetter.

“You’re so —” Eugene can’t say speak the words. Sometimes it feels as though a script is being fed to him, and sometimes his tongue feels so free he doesn’t know what to say first. _Gorgeous_ , he thinks, as Snafu tosses his head and his curls bounce and catch the sunlight. Mouth open, a plush slick O, and brows drawn down in pleasure. Sometimes Eugene wonders if he looks the same in this world. Whether he looks as pale and hungry as he does in reality.

Reality, the hazy concept. He squeezes at Snafu’s thighs, feels the rough fuzz of hair, the tension of muscle underneath, flexing. This feels more real than the pale world that Ambrose exists in these days. More vibrant, more immediate. The roll of Snafu’s hips slows as he comes down from his orgasm, hand braced to Eugene’s chest as he shudders and grins into the afterglow. 

“I’m so _what_ ,” he drawls, eyes closed and face tipped towards the sun. They’ve made an indentation in the long grass with their fucking, a cosy little pocket shaped to the borders of their bodies. Just for them. The thought makes Eugene buck up into the wet heat of Snafu’s body, his nails digging into Snafu’s thighs just enough to make him hiss, and laugh.

“Everythin’,” Eugene mutters. He feels hot all over, prickly with it. His sweat is Snafu’s sweat, his spit, his cum. One body. It hurts to exist alone when he wakes from dreams like these. “You’re everythin’.”

“Biased,” Snafu accuses. The dog between his nipples leers at Eugene; Snafu’s second set of eyes when he’s not looking. Eugene reaches up to touch it, to test his fingertips to its maw and wish they could slide inside as easily as his fingers had slipped into Snafu right there, between his legs. Centre of Eugene’s world, at least for now. 

The thought has him shifting them both; tipping Snafu onto his back as the man laughs, hand going reflexively to Eugene’s hair as he ducks his face between Snafu’s legs. He tastes like salt and musk there, his wet clinging to the dark hair that runs from his navel to his hole. Eugene mouths at it, hungrily, urged on by Snafu’s fingers tightening in his hair, by the barely audible sighs of _yeah, right there_. The hard swell of his dick, the velvet heat of his hole. Tasting him like this makes Eugene feel as wolfish as the dog on Snafu’s chest. Makes him want to eat Snafu up until there’s nothing left of either of them. Just the imprint of their bodies in the long, dancing grass. Only the low-hanging sun to see their disappearance. 

Snafu’s fingers slip to Eugene’s neck, to press each fingertip to his shoulder. A lot goes unsaid in their reality. Eugene’s fingers press inside him, and as though a cord has been cut, Snafu goes limp. Fingers stroking over Eugene’s nape as he sighs, and hums. 

“Sometimes I never wanna give you back,” Snafu breathes, voice hitching as Eugene passes his tongue over his dick. The wind picks up, fragrant and cooling their sweat as Snafu’s back arches, the hand on the back of Eugene’s head pressing him closer. “We could do this forever.” His voice is tight with pleasure. Eugene doesn’t have to see Snafu’s face to know he’s grinning up at the wide blue cloudless sky above them. 

Snafu cums again under Eugene’s relentless mouth, and it’s only when he coaxes Eugene back up and back inside of him that Eugene can speak. Face tucked into Snafu’s neck, the man’s legs up around him as he grinds his hips into the mess they’ve made. “I’d let you,” he says, voice low and coming right from his chest. “I’d let you keep me here, let my body sleep away in that bed for the rest of my life.”

“You’d live forever,” Snafu breathes, sounding hazy and drowsy, fingers combing gently through Eugene’s hair. “Right here, with me.”

Eugene shifts, presses his nose to the hollow of Snafu’s throat before his mouth finds his nipples, his teeth the meat of the man’s chest. “Say it again,” he mumbles, mouth wet against the tattoo. Pumping away into Snafu like there’s a hook embedded behind his navel, pulling and tugging and urging his hips forward. 

The sea of grass whispers around them. In Eugene’s ear, Snafu murmurs, “You could stay with me, forever.”

It’s enough to tip Eugene over the edge, the thought. To be wrapped up in Snafu forever. All Eugene’s waking hours are full of him, so why not make the change for good? He groans into Snafu’s chest, shivering and jerking his hips forward as Snafu wraps his arms around Eugene’s shoulders, and makes a low, satisfied noise deep in his chest.

They lie together, nude, quiet in the afterglow. The grass is cool against Eugene’s bare, overheated skin, flattened down when he rolls onto his side so as not to lose sight of Snafu for even a second.

He’s smoking. Cigarette pulled from thin air. Smoke catching in the breeze that’s cooling the sweat on their bodies. As if sensing Eugene’s eyes on him, the corner of Snafu’s mouth curls, his eyes sliding slow to the side to meet Eugene’s gaze. “What?” he asks, and Eugene ducks his face into the crook of his elbow, suddenly come over strangely shy.

“Did you mean that stuff?” he asks, voice muffled. 

He hears Snafu snort. “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t.”

Eugene lets that marinate. Heart slowing in his chest. When he swallows, he can still taste Snafu; musksaltwet. Sometimes when Eugene wakes from a dream like this, the taste of him still lingers. It makes the dreams feel all the more real; makes the world he wakes to seem even paler and unreal in comparison. He hasn’t seen Burgie in a while. Outside of dreams all Eugene does is wander his house like a ghoul, eyes on the forest as he shuffles from porch to kitchen to bedroom. Lingering over his writing desk, haunting his typewriter from afar. Half-asleep and numb, waiting for his over-rested body to feel tired once more. 

“I wish I could stay longer,” he admits, eyes drawn back to the sky once more. A bird is wheeling through the expanse of blue. Curiously, Eugene wonders why Snafu had decided to inject a living thing besides themselves into this world. “Wish I could just snap my fingers and fall asleep.”

Snafu hums, but doesn’t reply. The sweet smell of his smoke curls through the air, fogging the bright, fresh smell of the grass, of the distant flowers. Heady and heavy, Snafu’s own specific perfume. Eugene wishes he knew what Snafu wanted. Wishes he could prise his way into his head the way Snafu’s so easily slipped into Eugene’s. 

“I never expected it to go this far,” Snafu says, finally. His voice is thoughtful, brows beetled when Eugene glances to the side to gauge his expression.

“How far did you want it to go?”

Snafu shrugs, eyes upturned to watch the bird as he says, “I didn’t even know it’d begin.”

 _Liar,_ Eugene thinks, mind on the hag stone he’d found secreted away in his bedroom. Snafu’s eyes flick to him, and then away, as if he heard. Hadn’t it been him who’d said he wanted Eugene from the minute he saw him? And that minute wasn’t through the hazy screen door like Eugene’s minute was. 

Eugene says, “You made sure it did though.” Snafu hums. Eugene catches sight of that pale scar on his palm as he lifts his arms above his head with a groan, ribcage swelling against his skin with the stretch.

“I might’ve.” He yawns, and then relaxes back into the grass. Hands tossed over his head, and eyes closed now. Another scar lurks there; one that Eugene has never seen before. Pink, and jagged, tucked away near his armpit. Then Snafu says, “Is that what you think? That it was all pre-meditated?”

Eugene tears his eyes from the scar, distracted. “I don’t know,” he says, honestly. The cool breeze smells like rain now. A perfect counterpoint to the syrupy heat of the sun. Above their heads, the long grasses dance. Eugene likes these sorts of dreams the best. The ones where it’s obvious that he’s dreaming, where he doesn’t have to hold each detail to the light to examine it. “They scared me,” he adds, once it becomes clear that Snafu is still waiting for him to speak.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Sure.” Eugene shifts, the springy, flattened grass underneath him prickling his bare skin. To his side, he can feel Snafu looking at him. Eugene keeps his eyes fixedly on the cloudless blue sky. “Maybe scared ain’t the right word. ’S disturbin’ to see places in your dreams where you ain’t ever been.” He pauses. “Or people you don’t know, sights you’ve never seen. Death, war.”

Snafu is quiet for a minute, the sounds of the dream-world filling the silence. The distant cry of that bird. Eugene watches it wheel through the blue, just as Snafu murmurs, “I just wanted to show you who I am.” His voice is soft. “It was the only way I could think to.”

Eugene slides his eyes to him, meeting Snafu’s gaze easily. His hands are resting lightly over his sternum, eyes big and roving over Eugene’s face. In his chest, Eugene’s heart squeezes. “Really?”

Snafu’s eyes flick heavenward as he shrugs. “I ain’t so good at talking. All this,” he gestures idly, “It’s easier.”

Eugene thinks about how hard it’d been to get a grasp on Snafu, how his brain had muddled over the man with no joy. He has a point, Eugene supposes. If there’s an easier way to communicate, why not take it? Again, his eyes are drawn to the pale scar at Snafu’s armpit, lingering above the dark hair there. Different to the scars on his chest, half covered over by that tattoo. Eugene wants to ask after it, but something stays his question. Maybe he is being fed a punchcard of conversation after all. 

Snafu is talking again, oblivious to Eugene’s distraction, or so it seems. “After a while, I got to dreamin’ with you without even tryin’. Like my head was seekin’ you out every time I laid down to sleep.”

“Oh,” Eugene murmurs. How intimate. Somehow more intimate than what they had been doing before they’d slumped sweaty and sated into the grass. He can’t quite work out how to respond to something so candid; a glance at Snafu shows him looking right at Eugene, face nudged against the soft inside of his bicep. 

Idly, Snafu’s fingers twitch in the long grass that he’s twisting between his fingertips, and then he’s shifting, rolling onto his stomach to prop himself up on his elbows. The scar, hidden from view. “Is that too much?” he asks, mouth quirking in a smile as he presses his cheek to his shoulder. The grass has left long imprints on the skin of his back. Unbidden, Eugene reaches out to trace his fingers over the indents, smiling as Snafu shivers at the touch.

“No,” he says. “Just trying to wrap my head around this, is all.”

Snafu hums, and drops his attention to his hands, shredding grass between his nails once more. “Dream magic is like breathing. Once you know how to do it, it’s reflexive.” 

“Do you learn it?” 

Snafu shrugs one bare, bony shoulder. “Can do.” 

Curious, Eugene sits up. “So how did you do it?” Snafu’s eyes follow him, heavy-lidded and vaguely sleepy. The warm sun is beating down on their bare skin; it’s making Eugene drowsy too. Isn’t that strange? What would happen if he fell asleep within a dream? 

“That’s a story for another time,” Snafu says, and grins. The fresh breeze stirs his hair, the sweet curls at the top of his head. Wildflowers, green grass —

And Eugene wakes to his bed, to his muggy room, to the white ceiling staring back at him.

————

Eugene begins to wonder how he’d ever confused the waking world for the dreaming one. All those silly moments of uncertainty, of second-guessing, of image-one-image-two, spot the difference. The difference is as plain as the nose on his face. Sometimes, he wishes he could go back to that ignorance, go back to when reality seemed to ooze so steadily into unreality. So close they became one; two sides of the same coin. 

For a while, he tries. Tries to exist in reality. His mom had always been a big believer in there being too much of a good thing, and Eugene had readily inherited that from her. He’s never been a drinker, though Ambrose has been sending him to a nightly whiskey or two. Never a gambler, never a serial dater. Not a comfort eater, not a drug-taker; the only vice Eugene can admit to is a love for cigarettes, and a healthy appreciation for what two people can get up to in the bedroom. This means he _tries_. But his dreams, and Snafu, have an addictive quality that test his will unlike anything he’s ever come across. When awake, he thinks of dreaming. Going through the motions, his head off somewhere else. He spends time with a permanently-concerned Burgie. He cooks, he eats, he showers, he shaves. But there’s just no escaping it.

Reality is dull. Reality is waiting for the clock to pass to an hour where it could be acceptable for him to turn in for the night, or to nap. Reality is going through the motions of living; eating, washing, staring unblinkingly at a manuscript that becomes more foreign with each day that passes. A world so ingrained in reality can’t hold his attention any longer. Eugene feels listless, disconnected. Thoughts occupied by the slide of that strange sunlight over Snafu’s brown skin. By the quiet world in those dreams, born from Snafu’s own sweetly oblivious deafness. In comparison, Ambrose seems to heave with sound. The humming of the refrigerator, the whirr of the ceiling fan. The only thing that doesn’t cause affront is the low murmur of the forest, and Eugene may be caught up in an obsession he can’t quite comprehend, but he still has enough of a mind to understand why that might be.

The forest; deep green, boiling with pooling shadows. It still frightens him, in some faraway, disconnected way. That first dream, standing nude in the forest’s belly. Snafu emerging from the darkness that lurks between the trees, so black and complete that it’s like the world had been erased. Memory of it still manages to raise the hairs on the back of Eugene’s neck. 

Dullness gives way to resentment, of course. Eugene begrudges waking, begins to hate the sight of his bedroom ceiling, the way sunlight falls over the bed in the early hours of the morning. August, and it’s hotter than hot. A kind of sticky summer spell that seems set to bind him fast to his bed. Sunlight like honey. He thinks he must swallow plenty of it while he sleeps late into the afternoon, as his stomach rarely niggles at him for food anymore. It’s as though all the sustenance he needs can be found in the world he inhabits behind his eyelids. He and Snafu talk, and they fuck, they visit worlds and countries that Eugene could never have even dreamed of. Humid dripping jungles. Vast arid deserts. And when Eugene wakes he feels so full of the world that all he wants to do is sink back into it.

He’s getting so much sleep that his body resents the idea of more, just as much as he resents the idea of less. Eugene feels at war with himself. Tugged between his body and his mind. He thinks it’s almost inevitable, the battle that he feels lying on the horizon. 

The typewriter, its keys collecting dust. His reflection in the mirror; thin, and pale. None of that healthy summer flush he can normally depend on. Halfway to ghoulish and making no efforts to fix it. Eugene’s forgotten what Burgie’s kind blue eyes look like without the veneer of concern that lies over them these days. 

“Are you sleeping?” he asks, each time they see each other. 

Eugene, who doesn’t know how to tell Burgie that he’s sleeping so much that he feels in a constant state of just-woken-up, always says, “No, it’s impossible.”

He just wants to be asleep forever, as unrealistic as it may be. Nothing tugs at his mind in the real world anymore. His manuscript? Eugene can barely remember the plot. He even finds interacting with Burgie a chore, as guilty as it makes him feel.

The store smells like cardboard boxes and recycled air. Eugene never remembers how he gets places; he just is present, and then adjusts. Burgie is looking at him with a tight, concerned expression on his face. The fan whirrs in the silence.

“Is there anything at all I can do?” he asks. 

Eugene weighs the bottle of milk in his hand. Cold glass. He can’t remember picking it up. Something about it reminds him of a dream a few nights ago, him and Snafu pressed shoulder to shoulder in a bar, the clientele all shadowy-faced non-entities. He swallows. Burgie is waiting on a reply.

“Sleeping pills,” he says, and watches Burgie’s brow furrow. Eugene’s tongue feels dry, stuck to the roof of his mouth. “Do you have them?” 

Burgie’s mouth moves before Eugene hears the words. “I gave them to you.” His brow furrows further. “Did you take ‘em all?” 

For the first time in a while, Eugene questions the scene in front of him. Real, or not real? He’s been inside a whole different world for so long it’s hard to say. Taken up residence in image three. Which one was the real world again? His voice is croaky when he murmurs, “Oh, I forgot.” Heart banging away under his ribcage. “Sorry, Burg. The whole insomnia thing is makin’ me forgetful.”

Burgie looks halfway to disbelief, so Eugene knows he must look like real shit for Burgie to flick his eyes away, and relent. “I know how it feels,” he says. A cigarette is smoking away between his knuckles, his elbows on the counter as he watches Eugene do the slowest grocery shop of his life. The milk, in the crook of his arm. He should put it on the counter before he drops it and Ambrose eats it up. “You really need some sleep, huh?”

Part of Eugene knows he should feel guilty for this. He can practically see Burgie projecting his own memories of sleeplessness of him. Like what Eugene is going through is anything close to what Burgie experienced. Forcibly drugged, forcibly awake. Blinking at a foreign jungle with speed zipping through his system. Watching a friend take a knife to himself just to escape it.

Out loud, Eugene says, “I really do.”

This whole thing has made him selfish. Eugene doesn’t need to be in his right mind to know that. 

Burgie shuffles, eyes downcast as he taps his cigarette over the ashtray by the register. “Nearest clinic is in the next town over,” he says, and Eugene works hard to school his expression into neutrality. It feels very much like the moments after the school nurse deigns to send you home; watching her call your parents, trying to conceal the elation, but not too much for fear of her thinking you’ve recovered. “I’m sure they’d write you a scrip for pills. It’s been months.”

Eugene plucks a loaf of break from the display, and asks, “Do you think?” Tries to keep the hunger from his voice. The hope. Even now, he aches to be asleep. Snafu never comes to him in the waking world anymore. Eugene has contemplated breaking something in the house just to summon him, though he knows it’s useless. He’s not sure if Snafu was ever there in the first place.

“Sure.” Burgie rounds the counter, takes the groceries from Eugene’s arms. “I hate to see you like this.” 

_I hate it too_ , Eugene thinks, though he knows he and Burgie are talking about two very different things. If only Burgie knew how many hours Eugene was really sleeping. It’s incredible, really, the human capacity to sleep. 

As it is, Burgie pulls some strings. Gets Eugene an appointment at the clinic in Monument, a good forty minute drive. It means Eugene has to be awake, has to yank himself away from Snafu before he feels ready to, but sitting in the cab of Burgie’s truck he knows it’s all a means to an end. A glance in the mirror before he left had shown how rough he looks. No doctor worth their salt wouldn’t prescribe him, especially with the yarn Eugene is ready to spin. He’s a writer at heart, even if his typewriter is gathering dust and his manuscript is a distant dream. He knows he’ll get what he wants. 

Sitting in the truck, Eugene can’t help but compare this trip to the very first one he had taken with Burgie. That hot, honeysuckle-perfumed morning. Before Eugene knew what he was getting into, when he was tired and curious and awkward with Burgie. Fresh from that long train journey. Sweating in the surprising heat. It makes him wonder if he’d have ever come, if he knew what would be waiting for him. Eugene doesn’t feel like he knows himself well enough to work out whether he would or not. 

Burgie’s mouth is tight. That baseball cap shading his eyes, no music on the radio just like the first time. Static, almost musical in the way it dips and fades as they drive past low boggy land and dark lush forest. Eugene keeps trying to think of what to say, but failing. His voice feels caught in his throat. The two of them are smoking, filling the cab with the smell of it. Burgie shedding ash onto his knees as he jerks the steering wheel to avoid a turtle in the road.

“Shit,” he curses, blue eyes in the rearview. “Stupid animal.”

Out here, the roads roll out flat into nothingness. It means that when the town looms in the distance, it’s surprising. So different from Ambrose, with the groups of people that hug the sidewalks, clustered around outside of stores, bakeries. Even the quality of light feels different here; like Ambrose is being held hostage under some giant magnifying glass. Sometimes it’s so hot that Eugene feels like those ants he used to watch his brother torch as a kid. Running around, mindless.

Burgie pulls up into a parking lot and stays there; leaves Eugene to go inside and wait for his name to be called, to shuffle through an awkward conversation with a bored GP. The doctor’s eyes cling to the notepad in front of him. Eugene’s fingers make knots in his lap. Dimly, he wonders what Snafu would make of this, but then the GP is tearing a page from his clipboard and handing it to Eugene, and he’s emerging victorious into the sun with sleeping pills in hand. A warm, blustery day. Burgie stops off for pastries that Flo particularly likes from a bakery in town, and then together they ride home in silence, bumping over the potholes together in Burgie’s battered old truck. 

“Feels like it’s been longer since you arrived here,” Burgie offers, at some vague point in the journey home. Eugene is staring out of the window, watching the country rush by in a watercolour smear of green and brown and blue blue sky. He’s thinking about the hot coin of a sun in his dreams. Orange as an egg yolk. Sometimes, when the real sun hits the same height in the real sky, Eugene experiences an odd sense of inertia. That time of the day is hardest to unpeel from unreality. 

A minute too late, Eugene replies, “I dunno how long it’s even been.”

Burgie doesn’t respond. Eugene guesses it doesn’t matter. The sleeping pills are folded away into a discreet paper bag, rattling away in the amber bottle. E.B.SLEDGE stamped on the fold, tape to hold it shut. He thinks about getting home and swallowing one. The bottle says, _TAKE ONE AS NEEDED_. It’s to deter addicts. Eugene wonders how a sleeping pill addict could possibly judge when a pill is rightfully needed. It’s hard to believe he was once seriously considering that upper Burgie had been forced to take in Vietnam. 

They arrive in Ambrose before long, and Eugene isn’t so far gone to recognise the irony of this new entry into the town. He’s changed in ways he could’ve never predicted. Then the sign rises up, _Welcome to Ambrose_ in brand new inky black lettering, and Eugene makes a noise of surprise.

“Y’all repainted?”

Burgie hums. “Old sign was crackin’ in the sun.”

The slogan that Eugene hadn’t been able to see before comes into view, the truck moving fast enough that Eugene barely catches it as his eyes follow it. _Where dreams turn into reality_. Figures. He’s still doesn’t know what to make of the place. Whether it’s some flimsy facsimile, like those Hollywood movie sets. Plywood fronts like those old cowboy movies. Or something else, something closer to what his gut is telling him about the town. What was it he’d written, that very first day in town? _Mannequins_. Every inch of Ambrose seems to breathe and sweat and calculate. 

Burgie drops him at his door, the truck idling noisily until Eugene shuts himself away inside, and then it lingers a minute more beyond that. The part of him that’s not completely absorbed by his dreaming feels bad for making Burgie worry, but the part of him that is absorbed is bigger, louder, and has him pacing to the sink for a glass of water because he even hears Burgie’s truck pull away. 

Paper bag into the trash, pill bottle to the counter. Eugene’s hand shakes just slightly as he holds the glass under the water, the faucet turned on so high that it overfills almost immediately and soaks Eugene’s hand. He barely notices. His world has narrowed to the head of a pin. Mind already racing ahead to the day of dreaming ahead as he puts the pill in his mouth and tips his head back to swallow it. It flavours the water just slightly, the coating on it lost from sitting in his wet palm. Something strange and acrid. For some reason, Eugene thinks of an oily sheen sitting on the top of a glass of water, Snafu’s hand around it.

He eats a sandwich while he waits for the medicine to kick in. Eyes growing heavier and heavier, head nodding on his shoulders until Eugene feels ready to drag himself to bed. The close, sticky room, the lance of sunlight through the hag stone on the sill. Eugene knows it’d be hot to the touch if he picked it up, the black surface absorbing the sun’s heat. He doesn’t reach for it. Just watches it dreamily, hands on his chest as he dozes, and then finally gives himself over to blissful, cottony, chemical sleep.

————

The place they go most often is the looking glass double of Eugene’s porch. The blue roof, the dark forest, the smell of the hot ground and Snafu’s clean sweat. It feels right to make it their frequent meeting place; after all, it’s a sort of middle space. Tugged halfway between the dream and the waking world. The first place they’d kissed. A place of comfortable familiarity.

Snafu’s fingers are combing through Eugene’s hair. His back to the railings, Eugene’s head in his lap. From this angle, Snafu is a mess of features, Picasso-like when viewed upside down. His nostrils, the scruff darkening his jaw, a mouth and two eyes but —? Eugene wants to right himself, just to check that they’re all in the correct place but the hazy warmth of the day is pinning him to the boards. Stretched out on them so his feet jam up against the side of the house. Barefoot, the paint flaking and stuck to his soles. 

“What if you’re a figment of my imagination?” Eugene is asking Snafu, as the man snorts. His fingernails scratch at Eugene’s hairline.

“Does it matter if I am?”

Eugene huffs. “I’d like to know.”

Snafu says nothing, just smoothes his fingertips over Eugene’s face; his brow, his nose, his chin. Making a line right down the middle of him. The sun is making a halo of his curls, leaving his expression shadowy and indistinct when Eugene turns his eyes up to see him. A solid gold halo, like the ones Eugene had seen in a museum once. Jesus, Madonna, Saint Sebastian, their heads weighed down. Eugene always wondered if they’d be hot to the touch, or cool. The sun is affixing him so solidly to the decking that he couldn’t reach up to find out if he tried. 

“I know what you’re doin’ to get to see me more,” Snafu says, into the silence. 

Eugene’s heart jams up into his throat, and he shifts, Snafu’s hand falling easily away from him as Eugene sits up to meet the man’s eyes. Pale, heavy, and knowing. A curl of a smile lifting his mouth just so. “You do?” Eugene asks, and wonders why he feels so incredibly caught out. 

“You miss me that much,” Snafu murmurs, and it’s not a question but Eugene answers it anyway. 

“I do.” 

Silence. Their quiet world. Behind Snafu’s head, the low sun is a burning eye, crying. The lump in Eugene’s throat is like a fist that he just can’t swallow around, mouth dry from sudden anxiousness. He half expects Snafu to tell him to cut it out, to finally put his foot down and put a stop to Eugene’s favouring of this world over the real one. If he knows about the sleeping pills, he must know about the rest of it. 

So it’s a surprise when all he says is, “I bet if you took two you could be with me even longer.” Eyes huge and steady on Eugene’s face, the weight of his attention like a burning metal pin right through the centre of him. A cigarette is smoking between his fingers now. Eugene hadn’t caught its appearance, hadn’t caught it being lit. It’s like a tiny reminder of who this place belongs to, who calls the shots and brings Eugene to it every night. Eugene tries again to swallow against the lump in his throat, and watches the corner of Snafu’s mouth lift.

“Two?” he croaks, and Snafu seems to melt in such a way that Eugene suddenly finds himself with the man plastered up against his chest. Insinuated in between Eugene’s legs without him noticing, the smell of cloves on his breath and in his hair. The heat of his small body. Eugene’s hands find his waist before he even realises he’s moving them.

“No more than two,” Snafu purrs, and his eyelids dip, slowly. The colour in his eyes seems even more ambiguous now; pale and made paler, so grey they’re almost bleached entirely. Dead sea eyes. A reverberation of real fear is knocking around in Eugene’s chest, though it never seems to settle. Like something is keeping it from latching hold. “We don’t want you too asleep,” he adds, and kisses at Eugene’s jaw. Fingers curling in the collar of his shirt for an instant, before he straightens up and moves away. 

“You don’t?” Eugene asks, his voice distant even to his own ears. Snafu moves back into the bloody light of the sun, and Eugene loses track of what had even lit that firework of fear in him. 

“Sure.” Snafu shrugs a shoulder. Wrist crooked to keep his cigarette close to his mouth, the smoke curling and clinging to his hair as it funnels up towards the roof. No breeze to save Eugene from the spicysweet stink of it. He feels wrapped up in it, cocooned in the smell, made stupid by it. Aware of thoughts and feelings trying to anchor hold inside of him, only to lose their grip to slick unfeeling. 

“Why?”

Snafu’s brows turn down. “Because you’d die,” he says, so matter-of-factly that Eugene barely lingers on it. He’d die. Of course. Rot away into the mattress until he’s nothing more than a stain that Burgie will huff at and curse over. 

Will he flip the mattress, or buy a new one? Another person consumed by Ambrose. Milk sinking into the cracks in the stone path, running through the concrete to be sucked up by the grass, the dirt. Eugene supposes it’s inevitable, really. Hasn’t he felt claimed by this place from the very first afternoon he’d arrived? 

Snafu interrupts his thoughts. “But two of ‘em,” he murmurs, eyes faraway, sounding thoughtful. The smoke swirls about his head. “Two would be just right.”

Together, they watch that motionless sun drip, and melt. The world so silent that Eugene keeps hearing things his mind must be conjuring up. Distant voices, the slam of a car door, the ghostly bark of a dog. He wonders after the tattoo on Snafu’s chest. He wonders after the scar on his arm, in his armpit. He wonders if two is enough, wonders if three might do the job just as well. Could he sleep for twenty-four hours? Forty-eight? When would his body wake him, if it woke him at all? He supposes the only thing keeping that sleep from death is the rise and fall of his chest, his overactive mind behind it all. 

If he died mid-dream, would he know? 

“You’re being morbid,” Snafu mutters. The sun paints the side of his face a deep warm orange. Catches in his eyes, in his teeth, in the gold jewellery at his throat and in his ears. “You’re not gonna die.”

“Ain’t this like death?” Eugene asks, and Snafu huffs, covers his mouth with his cigarette. “Well, ain’t it?”

“You’re alive in here,” Snafu says. “You’re alive out there.”

 _Am I?_ Eugene wants to ask, but doesn’t. He doesn’t want to let Snafu in on the way the waking world is so uncomfortable and unpleasant to him now. Like the very air hurts him. The resentment that curls through him like a second bloodstream; resentment towards the sun, towards his reflection, towards all those human mundanities that doesn’t exist in the world beyond his eyelids; eating, washing, drinking. He suspects Snafu knows it all anyway. There seems to be no gap in his omnipotence. 

Instead, Eugene asks, “Do you feel alive in here?” 

Surprisingly, Snafu laughs. That loud, bark of a laugh that Eugene remembers from the day he’d first met him. “Of course I do,” he says, like it’s funny. “I bleed, I cry, I fuck. I’m alive here more than I’m alive anywhere else.”

So he feels it too. Maybe it’s universal, maybe it’s a byproduct of this whole unnatural experience. Even now, Eugene hasn’t completely ruled out madness, or brain-sickness. He expects that Snafu knows about that too. Three nights ago he’d removed a neat round of Eugene’s skull and peered inside. Eugene hadn’t dared to ask Snafu what he’d seen. He can still remember the sensation of it; the sound of the tool reverberating down to the very core of him, vibrations rattling through him as the metal teeth had caught in the bone and began to drill.

 _I bleed, I cry, I fuck_. Eugene hadn’t bled when Snafu had taken a chunk of him away. 

Snafu is watching him. Eyes half-lidded and sultry, the curve of his mouth dark by the draining light. Eugene feels struck again by his gaze, his thoughts blurring to a low murmur the longer he holds the other man’s eye. Smoothed out to nothing. If he was hooked up to a machine right now, the line would be flat. 

“What does it mean that the sun’s dying?” Eugene asks, as the world smears to dark watercolour around them. 

Snafu drops his eyes to his hands, pressing his thumb over that pale scar on his palm. “Do you know why you’re here?” he asks, looking very sweet with his dark curls and his dark lashes, his pale fish eyes. “Why it’s you and not somebody else?”

“No,” Eugene murmurs, as that burning eye of a sun continues to flood the world. Fire in Snafu’s teeth, when he smiles. 

“‘Cause you needed it.” His eyes flick away, catching on the sun. “‘Cause I hate to see people sufferin’ without sleep.” 

“Was I sufferin’?”

“You said you wanted it so bad you’d do anything.” His smile quirks, and his voice takes on that uncanny copy of Eugene’s own voice. “‘I'd give my soul for a good night's sleep’, weren’t it?”

Eugene huffs, though his chest is tight with some intangible emotion. “Well, I didn’t think anyone’d be listenin’.”

“It started out as wanting to help you,” Snafu says, as though Eugene hadn’t spoken. The darkening day is making Eugene anxious, but he’s so drawn towards this conversation that he can’t focus on it. “I don’t know what this is now.”

There’s a foot of space between them. Dying sun, stink of sulphur and ozone. The air swampy and wet. Had it really been warm and comfortable before? When had it changed? He and Snafu are prone to these meandering conversations; Eugene feels how this one is different. It’s almost tangible, so clear he feels he could touch it. The serious flatness of Snafu’s mouth. Eugene says nothing. 

“I went mad from loss of sleep. It was during the war, after a mine blew my eardrum out and left me hearing —” Here, he scrunches up his face. Tips his head to the side, as though he’s trying to dislodge water from his ear canal. “I didn’t want people to find out about me, so I never told medics shit. But it drove me mad. D’you they used to drug us?”

Burgie’s words, in Snafu’s mouth. Eugene nods. “I do.”

Snafu nods too, his eyes burning like the sun behind his head. No halo, now. The light of it is bloody and violent, painting the two of them in its glow. “I cut my axillary, and my ulnar just to speed it along.” Shockingly, here, he grins. Taps his fingers to his bicep. In his mind’s eye, Eugene sees the pale jagged scar there. “D’you know what loss of sleep can do?” 

Eugene can barely remember his weeks of insomnia. Born from the sticky heat and the inescapable weirdness of the town. But he remembers the sickly desperation. He would’ve done anything for sleep. Just as now he’d do anything to stay asleep. Isn’t it strange, the addictions that come to a head? He might’ve gone his whole life without knowing this side of himself, if Ambrose hadn’t risen to meet him while flicking through that phonebook.

“Nothin’ good,” he settles with, and Snafu snorts, and nods. 

“Got seven stitches inside me.” He jabs at his bicep. “And it woke up somethin’ in me I thought I wouldn’t get.”

A beat of silence. The words unravel from Eugene’s mouth like ticker tape. “So what does it have to do with me?” 

“Everythin’.” Snafu’s fingers curl around his own bicep, idly. “Nothin’.”

Eugene thinks of blood on the ground, blood shining wetly through a closed fist. Does he know those images, or does Snafu? Is there any distinction between the two any more? It feels like all he does now is question everything. His perception, other people’s motivations. Reality, unreality. What’s truth and what’s a lie. Is Snafu Burgie’s buddy, the section eight? Eugene’s head is reeling.

 _Are you real?_ he wants to cry. _Did I invent you?_ It’s useless. He’ll get some cryptic response that will only make more unanswerable questions to rise up in its wake. Snafu can’t give a straight answer. Even now, he’s watching Eugene with a lazy smile on his face, the sun a red dying light behind his head. Like he knows the crisis that Eugene is in. Angelic no more. If Eugene had reached up to tap that halo from earlier, he knows now he would’ve found it to be tin, false and flimsy. 

Whipcracks of flame slide across the sun’s dying face. In its glow, Snafu is handsome, wicked, pale eyes swallowing the light. “Just two pills,” he says, and Eugene knows the conversation is abandoned. No more talk about the scar, about sleep, about Snafu’s arterial blood wetting the floor of some foreign jungle. 

“Just two,” Eugene echoes, and surprises to find the slow drawl of Snafu’s accent in his own mouth. Snafu’s grin grows. 

“I’ll show you where I come from,” he offers, and gestures to the sky. “This place is ruined, we’ll find a new spot.”

“Ruined?” Eugene asks, the light hazy and hard to see by. Snafu has become little more than a dark silhouette, the world hot and orange around them. The two of them caught insects in amber, sealed together forevermore. For the first time, he thinks of his body, asleep in bed. “We can’t come back here?” 

Snafu shrugs one shoulder, eyes faraway as he gazes off up the road. Distantly, Eugene wonders if Ambrose exists in this place. What would he find if he stepped down off this porch and tried to take the walk into town? Would Snafu stop him? Would he fall off the edge of the world into nothingness? He supposes he’ll never find out. 

Together, they sit and watch the world crumble around them. That smell of ozone, of space. Just barely covered over by the skinny black cigarettes that Snafu manages to conjure from nowhere; sweet and smoky, church incense, the dark dark soil of some distant land. When the sun blinks out, the world goes so silent that Eugene wonders how he’d ever thought it was quiet before. Nothing lingers, but Snafu’s solid, warm presence at his side. Pale eyes in the darkness, lamplights to some strange and distant future that makes Eugene feel wary to even consider. 

He supposes there is no stopping this. Like a wheel set in motion; he has to carry it out to the end. Maybe that’s why no feeling can snag hold inside of him. Resignation has coated him over in something glasslike and impenetrable. He chose this. With the pills, with the disconnect from the world around him. It’s his duty to see it out to whatever inevitable end must wait. 

———

The sleeping pills are always a good idea until Eugene faces having to finally wake from his drugged sleep. It reminds him of that dragging period of his life that he spent swinging between red-eyed insomnia and deadened chemical drowsiness. The sleeping pill hangover; dry mouth, nausea. Part of him can’t believe he’s putting up with it again. A larger part considers it a fair trade-off for the things he gets to see and feel and do in his dreams. 

Being awake becomes more of a chore than ever. Eugene figures he doesn’t really have the perspective on why that must be; doesn’t have the distance yet to understand it. It may be the sleeping pills, it may be the extra time he gets to spend in that rich inner world that Snafu creates for him. It may be the fact that he’s ignoring his body in favour of his mind, and feels himself growing weaker and weaker as a result of it. Food turns his stomach. His reflection in the bathroom mirror is verging on gaunt; Eugene sees himself so rarely these days that it always comes as a heart-stopping shock that the pale, thin face in the reflection is his own. 

Maybe the real shock is how little it concerns him. He wakes now to eat a little, to brush his teeth, to shower. To smoke a gentle cigarette on the porch with the sun warming his closed eyes, and then it’s two sleeping pills down and he returns to the twist of sheets in his bedroom, and time is lost to him.

 _I’ve become one of them_ , he scrawls, notebook open on his knee and his pencil unfamiliar in his hand. Scratching away at the paper. He’s begun to keep a diary, more as an attempt to keep track of the time he’s losing than anything else. It’s difficult. There’s really no way to know what day it is without venturing into Ambrose for either a newspaper or Burgie’s terse reminder. _Friday, Gene, just like two days ago it was Tuesday._

Eugene’s always been neurotic. He supposes it must say a lot, that he doesn’t care about Burgie’s disapproval anymore.

_Maybe I grew here and left, and now I’ve been brought back, I’m being reabsorbed_. His pencil is loud in the quiet day. Nothing to disturb his silence but the rustle of the trees, the distant high whine of the cicadas. His manuscript has been stuffed into one of the drawers of the desk. He’d gotten sick of it being the very first thing he saw upon waking. 

He’s begun to feel like a shade of himself. Like a pale copy of whatever version of him exists in his dreams, like someone could pass their hand right through him with no effort at all. In dreams he’s solid, he’s human, flesh and blood. _I bleed, I cry, I fuck._ Is that all it takes to make a man?

At some vague point in their recent past, Snafu had taken Eugene to a field full of waist-high lovegrass, the smell of pollen and jasmine on the air. Spanish moss hanging lacy and lazy from the gnarled branches of ancient old oaks, drifting just so in the breeze. With each step they took through the grass, insects sprung from it, glowing in the hazy low light that drenched the scene. Quiet, as their dreams always are. Just the muffled sound of their footsteps, of the grasses rustling in their wake. 

“This is where you’re from?” Eugene breathed, as it had felt so wrong to raise his voice any further than that. A crumbling old plantation house sat slumped and half sunk into the grasses, grown over with ivy turned brown and brittle in the sun. Once white, but now the paint was peeling, fading, flaking, making it the colour of a tobacco-stained moustache. That dirty yellowed cream. Splintered beams like broken bones showing through flesh. The second storey porch, collapsed. Snafu made a low noise in the back of his throat at the sight of it. 

“In a way,” he said, as Eugene wondered silently whether this ruin existed in the real world too. 

They didn’t approach it. With the smell of warm grass in their noses, the two of them circled the house. Eugene’s eyes taking it hungrily in; the swollen, rotting wood, the cracked panes of glass, dusty and brown and jagged with time. He thinks he knows what Snafu meant by _in a way_. Sometimes the place you come from is the place your blood came from. Not your flesh, not your body. That sea of history running down from mother to child and into infinity. 

The back of the house was almost completely given away to the elements. Eugene saw a grand staircase, missing steps, the bannisters cracked and splintering, winding its way to nothing. No second floor remained. He couldn’t help feeling glad for it. He was certain at some point some wealthy northerner will come and tear it all down, raze it down to dirt until even the fragrant grasses don’t stand. And build something back up, something that will sit uncomfortably on the blood the ground underneath it had soaked up. 

As if he could sense the turn of Eugene’s thoughts, Snafu murmured, “I hate the thought of it too.”

They stood together, and regarded the ruined house in silence. Tiny flying insects flitting into their faces, rising up over the grasses to dart golden and frantic in the warm summer air. The smell of the place was rich. Honeysuckle, the long grasses, and swollen rotting wood. That fog of jasmine. Snafu’s cigarette, the hot ground they were standing on, the ancient stink of history roiling over it all. 

“Do you come here often?” Eugene asked, softly. 

Wordlessly, Snafu passed Eugene his cigarette. Eyed him as Eugene took a cautious drag, aware of how cloves go straight to his head. “No,” Snafu said, once the air was fogged with the smell of it. “Not often.”

“It feels sad,” Eugene murmured, and their eyes went once more to the crumbling house. In the low evening sunlight, it almost looked pretty. Hazy and golden, full of teeming life. Cicadas, the high trilling of the grasshoppers that sprung from the grass as Snafu huffed, and wandered away a few feet. He was wearing a thin cotton shirt, the buttons undone to his sternum and catching the light as he moved. The dog on his chest felt quiet, and solemn that day. No longer snapping at Eugene when Snafu turned to face him.

“It is sad,” he said. “It’s sad.” There’s little more he could say about it, Eugene could tell. In the same way that Snafu is such a preternaturally good read of Eugene, Eugene has begun to pick up on his moods too. His eyes were downcast, fingernail tapping idly against the butt of his cigarette. There in the golden light, Eugene’s not sure he’s ever looked so handsome. His chest ached, caught somewhere between red love and deep melancholia.

“I’m glad you showed me,” he offered, and the grasses whispered against the legs of his pants as he moved closer to Snafu. He touched the man’s elbow, hesitant. “Thank you.”

Snafu cast his eyes upwards, tracing the skeleton of the house before he sighed, and shook his head. Casting the solemn mood away. Though something lingers. Nothing is easy to shed in the sticky air of the south. “This ain’t everythin’,” he said. Pale eyes heavy and searching when they settled on Eugene’s face. “This is just the beginnin’ of everythin’.”

Since then, Snafu has shown Eugene all these other parts of himself. Saigon, eerie in its silence, in the shadowy, indistinct faces of passersby. They drink a warm beer in a low-ceilinged bar, and soak it up with food they pick through with their fingers while overlooking the brown, slow-moving river. Snafu never speaks much. It’s one of his quirks; Eugene feels pleased that Snafu would so silently show him these important facets of himself, like he’s something special. Trusting Eugene to know, to understand. He supposes it’s very much like Snafu, to favour the image over the spoken word. 

And then, the jungle. Frightening, chaotic, and deafening despite the muted quality that Snafu’s own deafness brings to their worlds. Hot rain, hot earth, hot air. The cacophony of war. Those are the dreams which edge closer to nightmares. He can’t imagine experiencing it first hand. Snafu’s huge, pale eyes peering through dusky twilight. Hawk-like and watchful, as if even he forgets he’s the master of it all sometimes. Eugene wishes they would go back to the relative normalcy of Saigon, or even the quiet sadness of the plantation. And Snafu must see this in him. Blood soaking through dark into the thirsty earth. 

“I watered the ground here,” Snafu whispers, as if they aren’t the only real bodies in the dream. “I’ll always exist here, in some way.”

In the time between, Eugene wakes, he scratches confusing entries in his journal. He smokes, he stares at himself in the mirror. Wonders if he’d have the strength to water a country with his own blood. Wonders if he could water the ground with another’s. 

“Do you feel bad?” he asks, the two of them stood in the middle of a sunny Vietnamese glade, ammunition flying harmlessly over their heads. He feels he doesn’t need to say what Snafu should feel bad about. Language is quickly becoming useless to them both.

Snafu, looking spooked and watchful, flicks his eyes away from the sky to meet Eugene’s gaze. “Yes,” he says, immediately. He’s wearing fatigues, an open shirt, the ink-blood-plasma memory of that dark tattoo between his nipples stained into the fabric of his once-white undershirt. And then, hot on that first reply’s heels. “It was kill or be killed.”

Eugene doesn’t understand it, but lets it drop. Some things in life aren’t supposed to be understood, not by those who haven’t gone through them. Instead, he throws his arm around Snafu’s shoulders, and pulls him in close. Heart in his throat, Snafu’s face tucked in close to his neck. 

It’s around this time that Eugene begins to take three sleeping pills instead of two.

It’s a move that Snafu hasn’t urged him into, not like last time, his hushed insistences under that melting sun. No, Eugene has come to this conclusion all by himself. Though it doesn’t come without a good week of mulling it over. The re-up he’d gotten that same week, filled to the brim and tempting, sat next to the sink. Eugene on the sofa with a cigarette and his eyes on the bottle. _Could I die?_ , he thinks. Across the room, the bottle proclaims, _TAKE ONE AS NEEDED_. If he needs one three times, does it work? Is it a convincing enough loophole? He’s never been a risk-taker. Sleep has become his biggest vice. 

Deep down, very very deep down, the person he used to be niggles at him. The sensible Eugene, the Eugene who’d moved somewhere remote to get away from all the distractions that Mobile holds for him, to work on his novel. A novel that he’s scrapped. A novel that languishes in a drawer because he can’t bear to be confronted with the failure of its abandonment. That Eugene is slamming his fists to the wall that his distraction has built around him, and he’s becoming harder to ignore.

Eugene’s not even sure how many hours he sleeps anymore. Night and day don’t mean anything to him. The world is just an endless slipstream of time, which Eugene feels distinctly like he’s drowning in more and more each day. 

Could he stop if he wanted to? That’s the addict’s greatest question, isn’t it? Just as a drunk feels like he must finish the bottle, Eugene feels as if he has to finish — what? There’s no end, no beginning. Just him and Snafu and that static sun, his prone body twisted up in the sickly heat that hangs over Ambrose. That thin rope of a track into town. Sometimes Eugene lies in bed before sleep wins him over, and wonders just what would happen if he fled to Ambrose. Fled to Burgie, spilled everything at his feet. He can imagine it.

White padded cell silence. He’d miss the half-deaf songs of the birds in Snafu’s little worlds. 

When he wakes to the forest, Eugene has to reorient himself just slightly. It’s a chilling replica of that very first dream in which he and Snafu had made contact. The slice of the moon through the thick canopy. The slight give of the soil underfoot. Off the beaten track. 

At least this time, Snafu had deigned to give him clothes.

With no Snafu in sight, Eugene starts walking. Aimlessly, led only by the pale light of the moon and the vague trail he finds between the trees. As though an animal had made it; no evidence of a human’s heavy foot. The night is silent and thick with the smell of pines, of something earthy and fragrant and overwhelmingly organic. The darkness has his senses tuned to that of a rabbit. Eugene hears every creak of the boughs above his head, every snap of a twig and rustle of the undergrowth. A shape flits across his path. Every muscle in Eugene’s body feels tense, his hands balled into watchful fists by his sides. The woods is becoming clearer to see, the canopy thinning as his nose adjusts to that deeply natural smell that carries on the faint breeze.

Swampy, bayou-stink. Still green water and everything that flits below its surface. 

The lights come through the trees before any shapes resolve themselves. A rich yellow glow, indistinct and bobbing untethered in the air until Eugene walks a few more feet and his eyes begin to adjust. Will o’wisp, except not. Man-made, man-lit. Lanterns sitting expectant in the windows of a low cottage, clinging to the bank of the bayou with its porch staked on stilts in the black water. Nothing moves. No wind to make waves. Just the flat white copy of the gibbous moon in the dark water, so solid and so unnatural that Eugene is sure he could go over and rap his knuckles against it. Find it hard and unyielding, hollow as an empty box. 

It’s too dark to make out anything more than the shape of the cottage. As though its absorbing the moonlight, or perhaps bouncing it back off to shine elsewhere. Repelled, soaked up. Somehow, it matters which one it is. Ambrose is so hungry Eugene knows it could only be one. His own stomach is twisted up in knots, a hard lump of fear that seems to be inching inexorably towards his windpipe the closer he strays to the squat building, to the glow of its lights in the windows. 

His reflection slides over them. Shimmering, wavering over the old glass. Pale and spooked and wide-eyed. Eugene looks like himself pre-Snafu. Or maybe it’s pre-insomnia, pre-Ambrose…when had everything started falling apart for him? There’s no time to ruminate on it. The porch creaks underfoot as he crosses it, soft wooden boards giving way under his feet just enough to make him nervous. Eugene imagines plunging into that dark water. Would he be able to surface? Would something swallow him up before he could even try?

Above the door hangs a dog’s skull. Yellowed with age, and mossy, as though it’s just been pulled from the earth. Wicked curved fangs and empty black eye sockets. Eugene finds himself transfixed by it, hand on the handsome brass doorknob but not making any move to turn it.

In the skull’s sockets, something flickers. Intelligence, life. And under Eugene’s loose grip, the doorknob turns from within.

Light floods out in a neat yellow box. Washing over Eugene, so sudden and so warm that the rest of the world seems to plummet into nothingness outside of it. The whole universe narrowing down to the inside of the cottage, to the lit square of rickety porch that Eugene is still lingering on. Snafu, standing in the doorway. A grin on his face and his hair beautiful and black and curling. In Eugene’s fear-frozen chest, his heart thumps, cautiously.

“So you found the place okay?” Snafu asks, his low drawl cutting clear through the night. Eugene hadn’t realised how silent the bayou was until he spoke. No birds, no bugs, no rustling trees. Just them, static and silent. Like an afterimage burned into photo paper. 

A beat too late, Eugene snaps, “Found the place? What was that, Snaf?”

Snafu shifts, slouching against the doorframe as his eyelids dip, and his smile grows. “Wanted to see if you could find me without me leadin’.” His attention flits away, over Eugene’s shoulder into the inky blackness beyond the thrown lamplight. “Wanna come inside?” he asks, almost like an afterthought.

Eugene glances over his shoulder. Nothing to see, but for darkness. He swallows thickly. “Please.”

After the walk through the woods, Eugene is finding it hard to switch gears. All his senses still on high alert even after Snafu nods him over the threshold, and then shuts the door tight behind him. The dog’s skull rattles on the other side, and despite the muggy warmth of the cottage, Eugene shivers. 

When he glances to Snafu, he finds the man watching him closely. Pale eyes like twin darts through the low lamplight. Flickering off the walls, off the ceiling, across Snafu’s skin. Eugene has to work to find his voice, unearthing it from deep inside himself as he murmurs, “Is this your home?”

“The last one,” Snafu says, with a nod. He’s barefoot, bare-chested, a pair of old blue jeans loose around his slim hips. In the flickering light, the dog on his chest seems to move. 

Eugene asks, “This is a dream, right?” and watches Snafu’s smile grow. 

“Does it feel like one?” he asks. 

Helplessly, Eugene shrugs, and then turns his eyes to the room at large. 

So distracted by the play of firelight over Snafu’s skin, he hadn’t taken more than a glance at the room after the man had urged him inside. It’s low-ceilinged, and dim, and made smaller by the sheer amount things cluttering the cottage from floor to ceiling. Dried flowers and plants move gently in the breeze from the open windows, the sills choked with various potted plants and herbs. The smell of sage and incense fogs the air, smoke funnelling up towards the ceiling from a low table thickly lacquered in candle wax. Fat white candles like chimneys emerging from the melted mess, powdered incense piled and burning in all the dips and valleys it creates. An huge cast iron oven sits on curled feet on one side of the room, next to a tiny round table with a couple chairs clustered around it to keep it company. An unmade bed, two mattresses piled on its wooden frame. A trunk, an armchair, a ponderous pile of books stacked next to it. The lamplight shining and glancing off the myriad of jars and bottles that line the mantel, the shelves above the oven, the broad bookcase groaning under the weight of its contents. 

“Take it all in,” Snafu mutters, dryly. When Eugene drags his attention back to the man, it’s to find him smiling, eyes curved and fond on Eugene. “Is it what you imagined?” he asks.

Eugene shakes his head, eyes alighting on the old, age-spotted mirror behind Snafu. It reflects the two of them, stuck within its patina’d brass frame. “I dunno if I ever imagined anythin’,” he admits. Snafu is so dubiously real that he’d never considered him to have something so ordinary as a home, even if the cottage is far from ordinary. The beams in the ceiling are so low that it’s a miracle than neither of them are very tall; instead of clocking his head off them, Eugene walks into a bunch of drying sage when Snafu gestures for him to sit at the table. 

“Careful,” Snafu warns, a smile in his voice. He seems oddly reticent, quiet in a different way than he usually is. Eugene wonders if he’s the first person to ever see this place. It’s always strange to have a person in your space. He can almost see Snafu looking at the cottage with new eyes, trying to see what Eugene himself is seeing. There’s so much stuff Eugene thinks it’ll take far more than a glance around; he wants to sink himself into it, to pick apart all the shelves and all the little drawers and boxes and jars and find out exactly what sort of person Snafu is. He knows he could spend hours in here, if Snafu let him.

Eugene sits at the spindly table, watching Snafu flit around the kitchen like a curly-headed wraith. Lamplight resting on the rings on his fingers, the necklace at his throat. Comfortable in the space, as he fills a teapot with water and settles it onto the stovetop. Eugene watches the bumps of his spine, the swell of his ribcage against his skin as he stands on his tiptoes to reach down a metal tin.

“Smell this,” he says, and thrusts it under Eugene’s noise. Reflexively, he recoils. “Gene, it’s tea.” Citrusy, spicy, black tea. Eugene casts Snafu a suspicious glance, which he laughs at. “Good?”

“Fine,” Eugene murmurs. The sound of boiling water fills the cottage, loud in the deep silence of the woods. Eugene’s eyes feel clung to every corner of the room, trying hard to absorb it all, so much so that he’s silent. Misses Snafu talking to him over the roil of the kettle and his own distraction as his eyes alight on a taxidermy bat tucked away amongst the books and knick knacks lining Snafu’s bookcase. 

“— Eugene?” 

He startles, and tears his eyes away. “Huh?”

Snafu is watching him, a smile playing around his mouth. “Do you like it?” he says, crossing his arms over his chest as he settles against the sink. The kettle rumbles away at his side.

“I like it,” Eugene says, turning back to the room at large. “You’ve gotta lot of stuff in here.”

Snafu laughs, scratching at the back of his head as he follows Eugene’s eye. Again, that strange shyness. “I guess. Haven’t ever noticed.” He shrugs. “You spend a lotta time with no place to call your own, stuff really starts to collect when you finally do.”

“You’ve lived here a long time?” Eugene has to pitch his voice a little louder over the noisy kettle. 

Snafu shrugs, and then turns away to grab a couple mugs down from the shelf over the stove, nudging various cloudy glass jars and bottles aside as he does so. “A while,” he mutters, as cryptic as usual. “It ain’t much but it’s home to me.”

Home. A tiny cottage glowing like a beacon in the depths of that dark forest. Is this why Burgie had warned Eugene away? He thinks of their conversation, so long ago that it’s been blurred by the sands of time. Or at least, it feels like a long time ago. A lot has happened since he and Burgie had sat together on the porch, and Burgie had told him that silly tale about witches. He wonders how Burgie would feel knowing that the story is true. Maybe on some level, he always knew.

The kettle is whistling. Snafu takes it off the heat and pours it over the leaves he’d spooned into the mugs, the steam coming up and curling through the muggy air. A hot drink for a hot day. Eugene accepts it with a thank you, their knees bumping under the small table as Snafu joins him. A bottle of whiskey sits in the middle of the table, a vibrant-looking basil plant keeping it company. Snafu pours a tot of it in each of their mugs, and then settles back with a sigh, his attention heavy as a weight on Eugene.

“Does it surprise you?” he asks. 

Eugene, blowing carefully on the steaming surface of his tea, raises his eyebrows at him. “Does what surprise me?” 

Snafu shrugs one bony shoulder, pressing his chin to it as he looks away once again at his home. “I dunno. I guess I wanna know what you’re thinkin’.” 

That surprises him. The tea sloshes in the mug as Eugene sets it down to the tabletop. “Don’t you know already?” 

Snafu snorts, glancing back at Eugene as if to gauge his expression. “I don’t read minds.” 

Eugene regards him across the table. The flickering lamplight on his face, the demure dip of his eyes as he glances down at the mug in his lap. For the first time, Eugene realises that for once he somehow has the upper hand here. Snafu’s brought him into his home. Has taken him to the sad beginning of things, taken him to the place his life changed so completely and so irrevocably. And now, this. The fragment of the world he’s managed to carve out for himself untouched by any hand but his own. 

“How do you expect me to feel?” Eugene asks, and Snafu laughs wryly. 

“I guess that’s the big question.” His eyes are soft and hesitant when they rise to meet Eugene’s own. Darker by the lamplight, ringed by black lashes. Sweet, bewitching. “Drink your tea,” he says. “It doesn’t matter.”

The world is inky black beyond the windows. Eugene wonders if they could be seen, if anybody were to pass by, but then catches himself. Who could possibly walk by? This dream feels so vivid and rooted in reality that he keeps applying the rules of the real world to it. He’s accustomed to sunlight. Out in the distance, a dog howls. 

The tea warms him from the inside out. Just on the edge of being bitter, the sweet-heat of the whiskey the only thing to keep it palatable for Eugene. They don’t speak, just sit together and share the silence of the woods, so complete that it feels as though a blanket has been thrown over the world. Eugene wonders if its always this quiet. He wonders if Snafu had chosen to live so far from civilisation for that exact reason, or whether it was some happy coincidence. 

“Why here?” he asks, after a while. Snafu’s bare feet are kicked up in his lap, the man slouched in his seat across the table. Tea finished, and eyes bright in his face as he swings his gaze around to meet Eugene’s. 

“Why not?” he asks. A smile quirks his lips at Eugene’s answering eye-roll. “I like it. I like being able to choose if I see people. I like knowing nobody will ever come across here.”

“How d’you know that?” 

Snafu shrugs, and tips his mug by the handle, peers inside. “I know you’ve heard the stories. Nobody comes into these woods unless they have to.” Here, he grins. A flash of teeth, mirror image of that tattoo on his chest. “Big bad witch, huh? Don’t I eat men’s hearts?” 

Eugene scoffs. “I bet you like that.”

Snafu inclines his head. “It keeps people away.”

Eugene finishes his tea, the generous measure of whiskey that Snafu had topped it off with spreading warm tendrils through his chest. Not anything close to drunkenness, but enough to loosen him up a little, to have him bracing his elbows to the table just to get a little closer to Snafu’s bubble. The man is regrading him with something darkly amused in his heavy-lidded eyes, that Mona Lisa smile on his face as a cigarette smokes away between his knuckles. 

“Read my leaves,” Eugene urges, and Snafu groans, tipping his head back to grin at the ceiling. “C’mon, I know you can.”

“You read too many books,” Snafu accuses, but heaves a sigh and pulls his feet from Eugene’s lap as he crosses the small kitchen to grab a saucer from the shelf. He brings a couple tiny glasses over too; thin green glass, which he fills to the brim with whiskey for them both.

“Are you tryin’ to get me drunk?” Eugene jokes, as Snafu snorts and snags Eugene’s mug from his side of the table. He flips it upside down over the saucer in one neat movement, and lets it rest there as he wanders away, comes back with an ashtray. 

“You want a smoke?” he asks. “I got normal cigarettes somewhere.”

“Sure,” Eugene says, but snags Snafu’s wrist to pull him close before he can walk away. “Gimme a kiss.”

Snafu smiles, and obliges him. Cloves on his breath, wrist warm under Eugene’s fingers. Thrumming away with his pulse. When they part, Snafu sways close to steal one more before he tugs away from Eugene’s grip. Soft, barely-there. So tender that Eugene feels pink from it long after Snafu has sat himself back at his seat across the table. 

“What?” Snafu asks, a smile playing around his mouth as he notices Eugene’s distraction.

Eugene, slipping a cigarette from the old pack of Luckies Snafu had dropped to the table, shrugs. “Doesn’t this just feel so normal?” he asks, and rolls his eyes when Snafu laughs. “C’mon, y’know what I mean.”

Snafu huffs, thumb to his mouth and elbow to the table as he watches Eugene light up. Firelight in his eyes. “Sure,” he says, and then drops his gaze. Nudges the end of his smoke to the edge of the ashtray. “Natural,” he adds, eyes flicking back up to meet Eugene’s as he skates his thumb over his lower lip. Eyes hazy and pale behind his cigarette smoke. Eugene feels caught by the eye contact, that silver pin of attention slid right through him once more. 

“Natural,” he echoes, just to see Snafu’s eyes curve. Eugene’s heart is thudding away below his breastbone, his affection red and visceral and overwhelmingly real. “What do the leaves say?” he asks, just to shift that heavy green-eyed attention from himself, just long enough to breathe. 

Snafu’s eyes drop. Eugene slumps, puppet with its strings cut. 

Most of the tea leaves have slid in a watery puddle onto the saucer, very black against the white china. The rest lie in the belly of the teacup, which Snafu is peering intently into. The shifting light from the gas lamps almost makes them look alive, catching wetly on the surface of the stewed leaves. Eugene watches Snafu read it, his thumb still pressed to the corner of his mouth, a wrinkle between his brows. 

“Well?” Eugene prompts, and Snafu’s eyes flick up. There’s something reserved in them, something distinctly distant. His hand drops from his mouth as he straightens up in his seat, and then shrugs. 

“Well, what d’you wanna hear?” he asks. 

Eugene, finding himself primed to second-guess the situation, makes a curious noise. “What, is it bad?” There’s something there in Snafu’s tone that he can’t read.”Just tell me what they say.”

Snafu’s eyes drift back to the mug. Idly, he nudges at it with his free hand, turning it just slightly. Eugene is looking curiously at it now too, distracted from how Snafu looks by the lamplight. He can’t see anything in it. Just a wet black mush. 

“It’s not bad,” Snafu says, slowly. “It’s just — surprisin’.”

Their eyes meet. Very clearly, Eugene thinks, _liar_. Clear enough to be heard, if Snafu was in the mood to be listening. Snafu’s eyes flit away, a hard read as ever.

“Surprisin’ how?”

Snafu sighs, and visibly relents. “C’mere,” he mutters, gesturing with the hand holding his cigarette. “Drag your chair to this side.” 

“Okay,” Eugene says, surprised. He moves, peering again at the tea leaves with his shoulder to Snafu’s, eyes following the man’s blunt finger as he points to the leaves. 

“So this here, y’see?” Two parallel curves. “Sleep. No surprise there. And then, right next to it. The same symbol, but turned counter-clockwise, see? It means,” he huffs, and casts his eyes to the ceiling. “To look inside, to see yourself.”

“Huh,” Eugene mutters. He’s dubious, at best. “But what does it mean?” 

“It’s right here with sleep, with change.” His fingertip hovers over a few specks of leaves that look just like all the other specks of leaves, to Eugene’s eyes. “Sleep, self-reflection, and change.” He huffs. “Pretty heavy-handed, huh?”

Eugene eyes him, laughter bubbling up inside him as he gives over to how batshit it all sounds. “No,” he says. “I don’t get it.” Then he laughs, because he’s found that even he has a limit in believing in things. Snafu stares at him for a moment, and then grins, and shakes his head.

“What, so you’re laughin’ at this?” he asks, and Eugene shrugs, helplessly. Snafu laughs, a loud, genuine sound. “This is where you draw the line?”

“I guess everyone’s gotta know where to stop,” Eugene says, though the reading still lingers there at the back of his mind as Snafu takes the mugs to the sink, and rinses them. Tea leaves down the drain, Eugene’s fortune erased. 

A handful of minutes later, they click the dark glasses of whiskey together, and then swallow them in one neat shot. “To us,” Snafu says, voice tight from the burn, and raises his glass between his fingertips. Eugene echoes him, and takes a drag from his forgotten cigarette to chase the whiskey down. One more of those and he’ll be tipsy. In the middle of the world. In the middle of the night. Right here in Snafu’s domain, though it’s barely the first time. Hasn’t he always been at the whim of the man? Being in his house is no different. Eugene can’t even be sure that what he’s showing Eugene is reality — but that’s the second-guessing again. The paranoia. Snafu should have no reason to lie, shouldn’t he? 

Eugene catches Snafu’s eye, and holds it. The pupils wide in the dim room, making them look dark and meltingly soft. Still there’s an edge of something there. _Sleep, self-reflection, change._ Eugene swallows, just as Snafu’s smile splits all the way up to his eyeteeth.

“You wanna smoke a joint?” he asks, and the night devolves.

Eugene wonders if this dream in particular will ever end. If the sun will ever rise in this world. If he himself will ever rise from bed in the other. Would he complain if he never did? Snafu rolls a messy joint in Bible paper, explaining the whole time that it was how they did it in ’Nam, even as Eugene watches on in silent discomfort. Still, he takes a drag. Lets the drug press into every inch of him. The taste of it, on Snafu’s tongue. They trade kisses pressed up against the sink, the cold porcelain cutting a slice into Eugene’s lower back as Snafu pushes his shirt up to touch him skin on skin. The joint burning low to his knuckles. The room fragmenting every time Eugene closes his eyes, that childhood feeling of everything blinking out of existence but yourself and the square of world you’re standing on. And Snafu. A warm, vital presence to Eugene’s front. His hip to Eugene’s hard dick. Bare chest, bare arms, shiny-smooth knot of a scar and the feeling of the hair on his belly. 

“You like it?” he asks, voice low and smoky against Eugene’s mouth. And Eugene knows that he means the dope, but can’t help but to take the question for so much more. _It_. The cottage, the dream, the closeness. Snafu’s hand cupping his dick through his clothes. He likes it all, that’s the problem. 

They have sex in Snafu’s bed, the balled-up sheets, the two-tiered mattress. Eugene sinks into it like a cloud, as Snafu sinks onto him and tosses his head back at the feeling. Curls catching the lamplight, the dog between his dark nipples snapping. 

“Is there where you dream with me?” Eugene asks, clutching at Snafu’s thighs as the man sets a fast pace, bouncing in Eugene’s lap. “You sleep here, and come to me?” 

Snafu laughs, eyes screwed up as he braces his hand flat to Eugene’s chest, pushing him down against the mattress. “What, that turns you on?” he asks, voice low and rough, making his question filthy. When he ducks close to kiss Eugene, hand clutching his chin to force his mouth open, Eugene groans into it. The wet slide of tongues. The wet slide of himself in Snafu’s body. 

“ _Yes_ ,” he pants, and when Snafu pulls back Eugene swears his eyes are yellow. Black dog eyes. Wet red mouth, kiss-bruised and sultry and open on a moan. Eugene hooks his fingers inside, hissing when Snafu bites down. Inhibitions made low by the weed, by the whiskey, Eugene slides his fingers back until Snafu’s eyes water. Until Eugene can press his fingertips to the man’s molars, feeling something ravenous and full of fangs opening up in his own chest as Snafu moans and blinks away tears. Still working himself on Eugene’s dick, their bodies moving against each other the only sound for miles around. Snafu’s so wet Eugene can smell it. He only tears his fingers from Snafu’s throat because he wants to touch him so bad, rolling his thumb over the little swell of the man’s dick as Snafu pants and wipes at his teary cheeks. 

Dream sex is too good to be true. It’s the only way Eugene knows that this isn’t reality. They sweat, they pant, they clutch at each other, but neither grow tired. Snafu is as easy to fuck into as he is when Eugene spends an hour mouthing at his dick and his hole, and Eugene’s stamina is ten times what he has in the waking world. It’s them, dialled up to eleven. Eugene thinks he could get addicted to this alone, if the rest of the dream world had no other draw for him. This, the way the light catches in the sheen of sweat on Snafu’s chest, and the noise he makes when Eugene presses his fingers against his asshole. Pleasure is a heady second bloodstream, and the first time that Snafu cums, it’s so perfect that Eugene almost follows him over the edge. The feeling of wetness in his lap, the way Snafu goes silent and still except for where he’s hot and slick and tightening around Eugene’s dick. 

“You —” Eugene can’t get the words out past the lump in his throat. All he can do is tug Snafu down until they’re chest to chest. Eugene wraps his arms around him, Snafu’s hands clutching at his shoulders, wishing there could be no space between them. Wishing they could sink together into one mass of pleasure, until Eugene could feel what Snafu feels.

He spills inside of Snafu just like that, the two of them clutching each other, Snafu’s mouth up against Eugene’s ear whispering a litany of filthy fantasies into it. Eugene’s clutching at his hip, at the swell of his ass, the old bed frame creaking under their bodies until finally, they fall still. Still wrapped up around each other. Snafu’s hot breath in Eugene’s ear.

“Was that good?” Eugene mumbles, a half-slur. Against his chest, Snafu shudders with laughter. 

“What’d you’d do if I said no?” he asks, and then heaves himself away with a groan. 

“I’d probably spiral,” Eugene says, and Snafu laughs again.

Eugene watches him pace naked to the table, snag his cigarettes and the ashtray, and come back. Sweat shiny and salty on his top lip when he leans down to kiss Eugene after he settles himself against the headboard. “One day I’ll do it,” he promises, and Eugene thinks, _how long do you expect this to go on?_ His dick is still half hard. Idly, Eugene palms at it as Snafu lights a cigarette, feeling drowsy and sated and warm in the soft bed.

“You never struck me as a person with a bed like this,” Eugene mumbles, eyes closing as he rests his temple to Snafu’s arm. It feels like it’s enveloping him, drawing him down with gentle arms until he reaches its feather-stuffed centre. Snafu snorts, and he lifts his arm to circle Eugene’s shoulders, drawing him in close until Eugene’s head is in his lap. 

“What kinda bed d’you think I’d have?” he asks, thumb tracing down Eugene’s nose as they settle together. The cosy fug of the clove cigarette in the close room. Eugene sighs, cupping at his balls as he relaxes further into the mattress.

“Dunno,” he says. “Guess it’s weird you sleep at all.”

It’s strange to think that his body — his flesh and blood body — is stretched out in a bed just the same as he is now. But alone, and sweating, afternoon sun probably beating down on him through the open windows. Eugene had fallen asleep mid-morning, but he’s never sure how long their dreams last in real-world time. It could be the next day when he wakes. It could be the next week. 

“I sleep all the time,” Snafu says, his cigarette rasping as he takes a drag from it. He taps at Eugene’s cheek, and when Eugene opens his eyes it’s to find Snafu’s smirking at him. “You’re not done?” he asks, as his hand slides down the middle of Eugene’s chest to splay possessively against his sternum. 

For a moment, Eugene blinks at him, feeling oddly like he’s been brought up from the brink of sleep. Foggy-brained, and heavy. But then he realises. His dick, curving hard against his stomach. Eugene laughs, embarrassed, and throws a hand back over his head as he tips his head back in Snafu’s lap. “Your fault,” he accuses, just to see Snafu smile. 

“Maybe just a little,” he murmurs, bringing his cigarette back to his lips as his eyes skate down Eugene’s body. “Jerk off, then,” he adds, a vein of something steely in his voice that has Eugene squeezing at himself. Snafu’s pupils are blown, his eyes dark and intense. Doe-eyed, pretty thing with that head of curls. Eugene can still smell his wet, musky and turned-on.

So, he jerks off. Time is such an indeterminate slipstream that he gives in to pleasure in these dreams with little provocation. There’s nothing to keep them from each other. Snafu smokes his cigarette and slips his hand under Eugene’s chin to cradle it, to keep his head tilted so their eyes can meet. The warmth of his palm against Eugene’s adam’s apple, the twin points of heat that are his fingers to his jaw. Overwhelming, Eugene’s hand tugging at his dick as Snafu plucks the cigarette from his mouth, and clouds the air blue with his smoke.

“I could make you do anything I liked,” he drawls, accent thick as cold molasses. “You know that, right?” Eugene can’t help the noise that escapes his mouth at that, lips parting as he sucks in a shaky, smoky lungful of air. “And you’d like it too,” Snafu adds, voice a low purr rumbling deep from his chest. A smile pulls at his mouth. He tilts Eugene’s head back further, eyes alive and wicked in his face. “I know what gets you off.”

All those surreal, disquieting, erotic dreams. Snafu’s hand testing the surface tension of his skin. The wolf’s bloody maw. Eugene moans, a shaky, surprised thing, and Snafu laughs.

“Yeah,” he mutters, and takes a drag from his smoke. “You know.”

His hand slides across Eugene’s nipples, just the barest stimulation. Eugene shudders in a gasp of air, ribcage swelling, and lets it out in one big sighing moan as Snafu pulls at a nipple. “Stop,” Eugene says, weakly. Snafu’s huge eyes rove over his body, heavy-lidded as he sinks his teeth into his lower lip. The corner of his mouth, quirking. 

“You like it,” he says, dismissively. His hand settles back at Eugene’s throat, a heavy hot presence over his windpipe. “Open your mouth,” he adds.

It feels like the room is spinning. Eugene wonders if he’s still stoned, wonders if he’s still host to that syrupy stickiness that pot always fills his head with. Slow-moving thoughts. His dick is hard in his hand, wet at the tip when he pushes his thumb to it. Like he hadn’t just come deep inside of Snafu a handful of minutes ago. It makes him feel flushed, pink-faced, desperate. He opens his mouth. Snafu’s fingers dig in on either side of his windpipe. He spits in Eugene’s mouth. 

“Jesus,” Eugene gasps, but then Snafu is leaning back away from him and settling back against the headboard. Eyes burning in the dim room. Resounding smugness on his face. Eugene feels prickly with arousal, like ants on his skin, blood rushing to his head as he grits his teeth, and mutters, “Jesus, Snaf,” even as the man yanks his head back again. 

“You’re all mine.” Possessiveness curls through Snafu’s words. It’s there in the way he bares his teeth, forces Eugene’s eyes on him, clutches hard at Eugene’s throat until Eugene is making desperate whimpering noises. Breathless, red-faced, caught right in that perfect space between completely embarrassed and turned on. They fuel each other. Snafu’s gaze is desultory, distant, melting. His eyes, yellow. 

His fingers tighten, and Eugene cums. Wet on his belly, toes curling in his sheets as he goes stiff, squeezing his eyes closed as Snafu snorts, and releases him. Eugene goes limp. Pulse pounding hard in his ears as he shudders through the last of his orgasm. When he blinks his eyes open, Snafu has gone back to the ends of his cigarette, the picture of disinterest. A curl of heated shame goes through Eugene, and he turns his face into Snafu’s belly with a groan. After a beat, Snafu’s big hand comes to settle over his ear, smoothing down his hair and holding him close. Under Eugene’s ribcage, his heart swells, and melts. 

“You liked that?” Snafu asks, softly. Eugene huffs, nose pressed into the prickly hair on Snafu’s belly. 

“Don’t you already know?” he deadpans. His hand is still around his softening dick; squeezing at it just slightly, just to feel the over-sensitised pleasure. When he swallows, his throat aches. 

Snafu says, “I like to hear you say it.” His voice comes muffled with his hand cupped so tenderly over Eugene’s ear.

“I liked it,” Eugene breathes. Snafu’s knee is digging into his back, the two of them twisted together awkwardly in a way that he’s only realising now. He shifts, and Snafu pats once at his cheek before letting him move away. Still, Eugene clings. Waits until Snafu leans to stub the butt of his cigarette out before gathering him down into the mattress.

The gauzy curtains flutter in the breeze the open windows let in. Eugene watches them dreamily, feeling calm and sated down to his bones. Snafu’s fingers are tracing his throat, gently. Curled up on his side with his cheek on Eugene’s bicep. Silence rings in the cabin. Eugene’s never felt like this for anybody in his life. 

“Am I under a spell?” he asks the ceiling. At his side, Snafu snorts.

“If you were, would I tell you?” 

Eugene gives him that one. Follows the grain on the wood on the ceiling, the low dark beams strung with drying flowers spinning gently in the breeze. It must be coming up off the water; the air smells green, and organic, cooling the sweat on Eugene’s skin. A drop crystal sways on a thin length of thread in front of the window. Eugene closes his eyes. Imagines the rainbow light that must bounce around the room on a sunny day, thrown by the prism. His breaths are coming slower and slower, wrapped up in Snafu’s company, in the drowsiness that always overtakes him after an orgasm, in the warm room and the soft bed.

“Don’t fall asleep,” Snafu mutters, pinching at Eugene’s chin and shaking him. Eugene hums, and bats his hand away. Snafu makes a noise, and pats his hand to Eugene’s cheek. “I mean it.” 

“What’d happen if I did?” he slurs, still toeing the line of a doze until Snafu jabs his fingers into his side and Eugene yelps, and squirms away. “Hey!”

“Idiot,” Snafu grumbles, though not without fondness. “I dunno what’d happen.” He eases his hand over Eugene’s waist, soothing at where he’d poked him. “Not about to find out with you.”

“Maybe I’d get to stay here forever,” Eugene murmurs, sinking his fingers into Snafu’s hair so he can pull him closer. Snafu goes easily, mouth curving with a smile as Eugene kisses him. “Would you like that?” 

“I wouldn’t hate it,” Snafu allows. His smile turns wicked, and he props himself up over Eugene as he kisses him again. “I’ll keep you here for good,” he says. “You can be all mine, huh?”

There’s something in his eyes which is disquieting, and hungry. The shine of lamplight in his teeth. Pale eyes. Not enough for Eugene to pull away from the kiss that Snafu coaxes him into, but enough to send a curl of _something_ through him. Something sharp that sticks in him, something like dread or fear but not quite. His tricky emotions. He wonders, distantly, if he’s forgetting how to feel.

————

The house is infested with ladybirds. 

Dozens of them clustering at the seams of the windows, shiny clumps of them at the corners of the room where ceiling meets wall. Eugene spends a whole bleary morning picking them from the windowsills, dropping them into a juice glass to release outside. They crawl against the sides, trapped but determined, rolling over each other in a desperate bid for escape. Eugene clamps his hand over the top of the glass. They scrabble ineffectually against his palm. 

He’s sure they’ll find their way back in. Crawling along the walls, along the windowsills, choking the sink and the garbage can and all the tiny cracks in the walls. Eugene loses himself to the repetition of prising them from their hiding places. To the surprisingly solid noise that their little beetle bodies make as they hit the bottom of the glass.

He releases them at the border of the forest. Leaves the glass there on its side so they can crawl out on their own. There’s always a few that want to stay. Eugene stands and watches them for a time, zoning out into that cottony loose-headedness the sleeping pills give him. 

There’s so much on his mind that it’s become nothing. Eugene’s stomach growls. The ladybirds are all heading back in the direction he’s just come. Eugene walks with them. 

He’s been having a guilty feeling lately. It normally hits around mealtimes, or when he’s stood at the sink with three white pills in the palm of his hand. When Burgie comes to drop food off, when Burgie comes to stare at him and ask gentle, uncomfortable questions. When Eugene glances at his empty typewriter. He’s putting holes in his brain, he thinks. Is the knowledge that he’s out of control enough? 

He couldn’t stop this if he tried. 

“Do you think I have a problem?” Eugene asks Snafu, some indeterminate time later. 

Snafu, who is fishing, makes a noise. “Not to me.”

They’re sat together on the porch that juts from Snafu’s cottage, bare legs hanging over the edge of it as Snafu dips a long pole into the dark water. Daylight, and the swamp looks different. Beautiful. Sunlight through the trees, glancing off the deep green water. Spanish moss moving gauzily in the breeze, the smell of something flowering carried along with it. Snafu has yet to catch a fish. Eugene thinks it may be more of an exercise in sitting still and not thinking about anything, rather than actually catching anything.

“But to others,” he prompts, and Snafu huffs, drags his eyes from where the line breaks the surface of the water.

“Maybe,” he says. The low sun is catching him beautifully, that perfect late-evening golden light. “Does it matter?” 

It doesn’t feel the right sort of setting for Eugene to have anxiety crawling up through him like ants. Snafu’s cosy cottage, the warm boards of the deck, the temperate water that Eugene can touch his toes to if he stretches. The warm golden sunlight, Snafu’s knee pressed comfortably next to his own. Nevertheless, the anxiety persists. Eugene’s never had much sense. “I’m scared,” he admits, and watches Snafu’s brow wrinkle. 

“Scared?” he echoes. He shifts the fishing pole to his other hand, lays the now-freed one on Eugene’s knee. “Why?” 

Eugene looks at him, eyes roving over Snafu’s sweet, sharp face, trying to gauge the impact of expressing how he really feels. Their time together always feels unreal, and perfect; every single element of it. The warm weather, the static sun hanging there at the perfect point to wash the world gold. No responsibilities, no worries. It feels out of place, then, to say what he wants to. That gnawing feeling of guilt, that he’s doing something wrong. That he’s doing something wrong to _himself_. That he can’t stop. Is it possible to want to, while at the same time not wanting to? Eugene feels himself caught between the two. 

“Gene?” Snafu prompts, patting at his leg. All around them the world is full of the chorus of the bayou. Bull frogs croak lowly in the reeds. The high, warbling song of a cicada rises and falls through the trees. Eugene turns his head, seeks out the opposite bank across the cool green water, and wonders just how far he’d get on foot. 

This forest wraps around the world. He’s sure of it.

“I don’t think I have control over this anymore,” he mutters. His hands, hooked over the edge of the deck, flex against the wood. “I dunno if I ever did.”

Silence, from Snafu. Eugene knows he wouldn’t be able to read it if he tried.

He continues. “I spend every second I’m awake thinkin’ about this, thinkin’ about you. Feels like I’m just waitin’ for the next time I get to see you, like my life is all strung together moments with these huge gaps of nothingness in between.” Eugene’s still watching the opposite bank. Part of him isn’t sure whether he’d like to know what expression lies in wait on Snafu’s face. “It’s eating me up,” he admits. “Don’t wanna be anywhere but here, but that feels like something I shouldn’t want.”

In a way, everything circles back to vice. Too much of a good thing. He thinks he’s found that line where ‘enough’ becomes ‘too much’, and that line is now miles behind him. Eugene’s racing towards something he doesn’t understand.

The bobber on the end of Snafu’s line rocks gently in the water. Together, they watch it, until Snafu clears his throat and says, “Why d’you think you shouldn’t want it?” 

Eugene looks to him, then. Surprised. Is is not enough to find the limit, and to know it? “‘Cause I can’t give up my life for this —”

 _A fondness, a particular liking of something that goes beyond real sense. Burgie's partiality for that horrible old cap. Eugene's own partiality for old things. Love, passion, penchant…_

“— Obsession,” he blurts. Shit, is it too late to wake up in his own bed back in Mobile? He wouldn’t be surprised in the least. To wake up, to feed his cat, to drink a cup of coffee before getting to work on writing for the day. Head groggy from the longest, weirdest dream of his life. 

Snafu is eyeing him. His hand isn’t on Eugene’s knee anymore. With a sigh, he reels his line in, the bobber dragging through the water and making wrinkles in the flat glass surface of it. Eugene can smell the breeze coming in off the water, that wet green freshness. His head feels hot, his bare shoulders pinking under the sun.

“What makes your life here any less real?” Snafu asks, finally, once he has the line wound in and the bobber making wet dots on the hot wood of the deck. He sets it aside, fixes Eugene with a heavy look as he reaches to grab his cigarettes from nearby. The tattoo on his chest shifts with the movement of his arms. “Huh? Why is the life you’re livin’ when you’re awake more important than the one you have here?” 

Eugene blinks at him. Watches Snafu draw one of those black cigarettes from the pack, and light it, before he can formulate a response. “Because it’s real,” he says. “Because that’s where my family is, my friends. My fuckin’ cat, my book!” He’s raising his voice. It echoes oddly through the sticky golden light, laying like a blanket over them. 

Snafu ashes into the water below their feet. “This place can be as real as you want, if you let it.” His voice is tight. His eyes flash, fixing Eugene in place. “What have I always said, Gene? _Does it feel real?_ ” He sounds the words out slow, like Eugene’s stupid. “The only reason you think the place you go when you wake up is more real than this one is because everything tells you so. Make your own decisions.” He huffs, takes a drag from his cigarette. “Shit, you could be happy here, y’know.”

Eugene knows he’s right, but it’s less about the ‘here’ and more about who he’s with. “Can’t we just be like this and be awake?” he asks, helplessly. It’s a last ditch attempt to keep from succumbing to Snafu’s reasoning. Doesn’t an addict always want to take the road that justifies their addiction? Eugene thinks that a small part of him might’ve known that Snafu would make it all make sense when he’d spoken.

He can just see the tail end of the pink scar tucked away under Snafu’s arm. Flat and shiny in the sunlight. Snafu takes his cigarette from his mouth, and snaps, “No,” so emphatically that Eugene knows better than to pry.

They fall back into silence, though the fishing is abandoned and Snafu’s cigarette smoke is turning the air above their heads strange and sweet. Catching like a spun-gold veil in the afternoon light. Snafu has an air of prickliness about him that Eugene doesn’t dare try and breach. He doesn’t wanna get stung. Instead, he watches the water, watches the surface of it wrinkle with the breeze. Behind them, the old house creaks and groans as it settles in the heat.

When Snafu speaks, some handful of minutes later, his voice is soft. “You’re the one who went out and got those sleepin’ pills. You’re the one who wanted more of this. So if you don’t like it anymore, you can put a stop to it.” He raises his cigarette to his mouth, and takes a drag. Eugene is watching him closely. “’S all in your hands, Gene.”

 _Liar,_ Eugene thinks. Snafu’s eyes don’t even flicker away from the end of his smoke. 

Still, when Snafu kisses him, Eugene goes easily. Spellbound. Sometimes he wonders just who is moving his body. He thinks of the ladybirds, crawling over his palms. Snafu, looking fey and wicked by the orange sunset, with his black hair and his pale eyes and the impish curve of his mouth. Is he the stupid insect, crawling back to a place he can’t thrive? 

————

“I’m not drivin’ you to pick up any more sleeping pills,” Burgie says. 

The fan runs into the silence that follows his words. Quietly, the only other shopper in the store leaves, the bell jingling over the door as he goes. Eugene watches him walk past the front windows, the big dusty glass affairs that make the store so greenhouse-like in the sun. Their eyes meet. Eugene wonders what the man sees.

“D’you hear me?” Burgie asks, sounding sterner now. 

Eugene clears his throat, still watching the wavy, hazy view of Ambrose through the front windows. “You should really clean the windows, Burg.”

“You’re welcome to ‘em.”

Eugene laughs, humourlessly. 

The intangibility of his emotions has followed him from the dreamworld into his waking life. Right now, Eugene can feel something attempting to catch hold inside of him, but knows it won’t make it. He glances back at Burgie. 

“Remember when you suggested that the reason I couldn’t sleep was ‘cause I was chasin’ sleep too hard?” he asks. The man’s expression is blank, not even a flicker of recognition. “You don’t remember?”

“I don’t.”

Eugene’s bottle of water is sweating a ring of condensation onto the wooden counter next to the register. He’d pulled it from the fridge ten minutes ago, but Burgie hasn’t yet made him pay for it. He knows Eugene won’t leave without paying. Eugene knows he’ll have to just take it if Burgie doesn’t let up soon. He feels faint from the heat, faint from the walk into Ambrose. He wants to go home, drink it, and trip down into chemical sleep. 

“Well, I remember.” He shuffles a dollar from his wallet. Burgie’s eyes flick down to it, and Eugene sees his mouth tighten. Puzzle book on his knee, a pencil with the tip chewed ragged in his hand. Eugene really does remember that day well. Back when he was the only flesh and blood person walking about Ambrose, or so he thought. Isn’t it funny the way things change? Ambrose has always pulsed with an unpleasant, unnatural kind of life. Fleshy, visceral, like a great hulking creature made up of all the parts of other creatures. Sweating and groaning in the heat. Its people pulse along with it. 

Eugene feels like he can see the throb of Burgie’s pulse in his throat. Can see green veins in the back of his hands, running cordlike up his suntanned forearms. If you stuck Burgie, he’d spill. _I bleed, I cry, I fuck._ You couldn’t stick Eugene if you tried; any efforts would pass right through.

He puts the dollar on the counter. With a sigh, Burgie says, “See you next week, Gene.”

The bell rings out over the door, the sound seeming to warp and shift as Eugene passes under it. The heat hits him like a wall as soon as he moves from the nebulous cool of the inside of the store, to the direct sun of the sidewalk. The smell of asphalt, softening in the heat. Strangely, Eugene is reminded of stepping down from that train at that halfway place between home and Ambrose. Burgie’s truck idling in the parking lot.

A lot has changed. Eugene’s more tired these days. 

He’s had a lot of time to think since that evening he and Snafu had sat out on the deck of his cottage. The fishing lure bobbing in the still green water. Snafu, beautiful by the sunlight, something sharp and not entirely truthful tucked away behind his molars. Eugene hasn’t taken any sleeping pills since then. He doesn’t have many left; less than ten rattling around the bottom of the bottle that sits on his bedside. At night, he lies in bed and holds it up to the window, watches them roll around in there by the moon’s cold, disinterested light. Thinking. Turning things over in his head.

When he does sleep, he dreams of nothing. Blinking eyes in the darkness. The flash of teeth by moonlight. Nothing like the vivid, immersive, achingly real dreams from before. And Eugene misses them, misses them like he’d miss an organ, or a limb. 

He’s been creeping toward a conclusion for a few days, by now. Even though he’s not dreaming, he still finds himself distracted by it, and by Snafu, every waking minute. Wondering what Snafu is up to. Wondering what they could be getting up to while Eugene sits and smokes and stews, and drinks. Watches the woods. Dreams his hollow dreams and wakes to an empty day. 

The break from dreaming hasn’t fixed everything that the dreaming itself had caused to go awry. Eugene’s manuscript is still stalled and stuffed in a drawer. He still feels disconnected and dreamy and unwilling to socialise. Everyday life still holds little joy for him. Eugene sleeps, and he eats, and he sits. Takes long meandering walks into Ambrose once a week for Burgie to crinkle his brow at him in concern. Watches the sleeping pills slide from one side of the bottle to the other, and back. 

Shouldn’t he allow himself a small happiness? The waiting to feel right again is intolerable. He misses the affection, the closeness, the easy familiarity. If Eugene had the power to examine himself objectively, he would’ve seen that giving in was inevitable. 

That afternoon after he gets back from the store, Eugene stands for a while in the middle of the house, motionless. Frozen to the spot with indecision. The bottle of water warming in the crook of his arm. 

When he’d left the house, he’d been resolute. He was going to come home, and wash a couple sleeping pills down with his water, and curl up in bed. See Snafu again. Slip back into what he’d been doing before, simply because he missed it so badly. But now, he feels struck down with indecision. Burgie’s open concern always makes him waver. Eugene thinks the other man has been happy to see him out and about more, despite the half-asleep and melancholy state that Eugene finds himself in these days. If it hadn’t been for Burgie, Eugene knows he’d be asleep by now. Mind made up, and switched off for as long as his body will let him. 

_I bleed, I cry, I fuck,_ he thinks. Is it worth feeling a ghost just to make others more comfortable? The plastic bottle crunches, clutched to his chest by his arm as he worries at his fingers. It’s not, right? It’s not.

Eugene takes one pill. He eats a small meal. By the time he’s finished, his head is nodding, eyelids so heavy he can barely keep them open as he paces through to the bedroom. The hagstone on the sill stares at him like a tiny eye, the dusky purple light outside its pupil. 

“I don’t care if it’s the right thing,” he tells it. In his drowsy state, Eugene could swear it blinks. 

He doesn’t have time to worry about whether Snafu will come to him, though that’s been on his mind since the vivid dreams had stopped. No, Eugene’s asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow, the relief of being back in the familiar state of drugged tiredness almost too much to bear. Or if not asleep, at least dozing. The smells of the world through the open window twist and melt, the sharp green smell of pine needles giving over to the smell of water. That strange, stagnant funk. The call of the catbird that Eugene sometimes hears in the evenings warps and bends on the cool twilight air, becomes a cicada’s whine, a grasshopper’s buzz, a dog’s howl. Then the room drops away, and the bed quickly follows, and Eugene must be fast asleep because there’s the soft sandy ground of the riverbank between his bare toes, and he’s alone.

Soft, diffuse sunlight. Not quite noon, but not quite dawn. Eugene used to love writing at this hour. He wonders if Snafu knows that. He wonders if Snafu is here somewhere.

The air is fresh, and dewy, fog rising up off the water, grey like the wispy clouds that cover the sun. None of that sticky, heady heat that Eugene normally associates with Ambrose, and with dreams. The morning is cool, and quiet, and Eugene is alone in it, the smell of milkweed and swamp lily in his nose. 

A fish jumps, breaking the surface of the still water in a mess of ripples. Eugene wanders down the bank a little way, expecting to see the familiar sight of Snafu’s cabin just around each bend, though it never surfaces. Is this a test? The same test that Snafu had put Eugene to the very first night he had visited the cabin? It’s the sort of thing Snafu would do. Eugene would walk the banks of this swamp to the Mississippi and down to the sea if it meant proving his draw to Snafu once again. 

Being back dreaming has brought everything back to the surface again. Eugene feels awake for the first time in a while; eyes bright, head clear. Smells are stronger, sounds are sharper. The pleasing slide of damp earth underfoot, the smell of crushed foliage and warm bark. He finds it hard to even focus on what had worried him in the waking world. Every time Eugene attempts to focus on those distant worries, they slip away from him, as quick and silvery as little fish. 

All he knows is that he misses Snafu, that he wants to be back by his side. It’s nice, to resort to those uncomplicated wants. Eugene’s never considered himself a very calm person. 

The sun doesn’t shift from behind the clouds, the watery sunlight doesn’t change. The only way to gauge how long Eugene has been walking is the ache in his calves, in his thighs. The sweat on his brow, despite the cool, fresh morning. Somewhere, a bird is trilling. Eugene can’t place the song. A warbling, rising and falling sound, so sweet and plaintive that Eugene stops, and lingers. The huge cypress trees sunk to their knees in the green water watch him closely. 

So distracted as Eugene is by the song, he doesn’t notice the shift of the water until movement catches him from the corner of his eye. Not like the fish that had broken the delicate calm before. This movement is near imperceptible. 

The duckweed on the surface of the water parts. A brown hand emerges.

Eugene stares at it, heart beating wildly in his chest. All around him, suddenly, the world is full of birdsong. That strange unidentifiable cry. Eugene scrambles down the bank of river as though summoned, as though there’s a fishhook in his guts reeling him to the water’s edge. He falls to his knees in the shallow water, silty mud between his toes and his fingers, as he catches himself. Sweat on his brow. 

_Did you miss me?_ he wants to ask. The rings on the hand’s fingers wink in the pale morning light. Citrine, turquoise, jet. _Is it you?_ The words are piling up in his throat; Eugene finds himself oddly mute, his heart so high up in his chest that it must be strangling his vocal cords. Still, the bird sings. _Is this it?_

There’s a patience to the hand. Risen up from the flat green water; Lady of the Lake, Witch of the Swamp. Eugene could almost laugh at the absurdity of it, if his voice box was working. Like it’s waiting, like it could wait there for a hundred years, and then a thousand more. It sounds like a lonely life. Swamp water in your mouth, in your eyes. The flit of fish your only company. 

Eugene takes the hand, and lets it draw him down into deep green nothingness, where even the pale sun cannot penetrate. 

Bubbles stream silver from his mouth. “Is this real?” Eugene asks. Silver fish catch the last fingers of light, flitting above their heads. Eugene can see the bulbous trunks of the cypress trees, the fluttering ribbons of water weeds.

Through the dark water, pale eyes like a deep sea creature, Snafu murmurs, “Does it feel real?”


	2. epilogue

Flo tells him not to head down there. She thinks he’s giving himself an ulcer, and maybe she’s right, but Burgie reckons this may be an ulcer made with good intentions. 

It’s funny how the ones that don’t look like much of anything end up being the most trouble. Burgie wants to blame the sensitive, artistic sensibility for how quickly Eugene went off the deep end, but hesitates to. 

The looming dark figure of the forest. That thing has scared him since before Burgie even knew what fear was. 

“I’m telling you,” Flo is saying, eyes on the magazine she’s flicking idly through, “Eugene’s a big boy. He ain’t your kin. You don’t have to go worryin’ after him and checkin’ up on him and drivin’ yourself to distraction over him.” She turns a glossy page. The sunlight coming in through the kitchen windows catches it, turns it into a flat square of shine. “Burg, I’m remarryin’ if you have a heart attack.”

“I know,” he grumbles, to all of it. Flo’s rarely wrong. He’s sure the day that she is wrong will bring about the end as they know it. “I just gotta go see him. He stopped into the store last week and weren’t right.”

“Sounds like he ain’t ever quite right,” she mutters, but allows Burgie to pull her in to press a kiss to the crown of her head despite it. She smells warm, dark hair gathering the sun in. They linger there for a moment like that, listening to the hum of the icebox and the dog chewing the hoof Burgie had given him. The crack of teeth on bone. Flo pats his ass. “Get goin’ then.”

He gets going. 

The cab of the truck is hot, despite the early hour. Cursing, Burgie rolls the windows down, cranks the A/C as high as it’ll go just to sit in the cool air for a second. The engine running into the quiet morning. The days have been cooler recently; that feverish heat that had clung from March onwards finally showing signs of breaking. Still, it’s Louisiana. Burgie pulls his cap from his head to wipe at the sweat on his brow, before settling it back on, and shifting the truck into reverse. 

Burgie doesn’t consider himself a jumpy person. After two tours in Vietnam, there’s little than can still ruffle his feathers. They mostly revolve around Flo, and illness, and maybe his own health too. She thinks he’s highly strung. Burgie doesn’t have the language skills to tell her just how highly strung he _should_ be, after those two messy years of combat. He prefers her not to know, anyway. Flo moaning about his smoking and all his little nighttime rituals is much better than the way she’d coddle him if she knew. 

So no, not jumpy. Cautious? Yes. His brain has been shaped in such a way now that it jumps right along to the worst conclusion without even pausing at the ones before it. He keeps thinking about the dark circles under Eugene’s eyes, the listless way he’d left the store a week ago. All those goddamn sleeping pills he’d gotten that Burgie had been an accessory to.

Never has the drive to the shotgun felt so long. Burgie flicks the radio off so he doesn’t have to listen to static, bumping along the potholes with the town blurring to nothing on either side. He has tunnel vision. Cigarette burning down quick with how fast he’s smoking it.

On patrol he used to get the same way. His world would narrow to the eye of a needle, nothing in it but the back of the guy in front of him, the crunch of their boots through undergrowth. Sight’s useless in places like that anyway; you learn to rely on your sense of smell, your hearing. You’ll sooner hear a twig crack three hundred feet away than see any of the enemy. Grip sweaty on your rifle. Eight years has passed since he came back to Ambrose. Burgie wonders how many more need to go by before he stops feeling the war in every stitch of the world. 

If Burgie was the superstitious sort, he’d think it was suspicious that he’s finding himself so wrapped up in the past today. So maybe it’s a good thing he’s not. The dust coming in through the open windows is choking him; Burgie coughs, and squints, rolls the windows up as the tires find that long strip of road that tethers the shotgun to the town. Crushes the butt of his cigarette out in the ashtray. Worry is making his chest tight. He heaves in a deep breath to try and ease it. 

The worry is the sort of worry that you try and keep as far away from you as possible. Burgie imagines it like a snapping animal, noosed on the end of a pole. If he let it drop, it’d have his head.

The side windows on the house are open, Burgie sees, as he pulls up outside. The bug screens down, and blurring the inside. Still, some part of him expects to see Eugene sat in his usual seat on the porch, a cigarette in hand and something distant and wistful on his face. But the chair is empty, the porch abandoned, the house radiating such a strange stillness that Burgie stays in the truck for a second. Hands still gripped on the steering wheel, the engine idling. He could still turn around and go home and eat breakfast with Flo, go open the store, have a normal day. But the worry would eat him up. All the what ifs buzzing like hornets in his skull. 

“Just to settle my mind,” he mutters to himself, as he pulls the keys from the ignition. “Gonna see that nothin’s outta place.”

He’s reminded of the time before that he did this, as Burgie approaches the house, jangling his keys nervously in his hands just to try and shake some sound into the day. It’s silent down here. Back when Burgie was a kid, when his grandparents used to live in this house, he used to imagine it was the forest swallowing all the noise up. He had a big imagination. Some of it still clings.

That morning he’d pulled Eugene from bed and made him shower. Burgie has been thinking about it a lot lately. Half as a means to reassure himself that Eugene is probably getting up to nothing worse than not showering and maybe working too hard. Half as a way to worry himself further. Burgie hadn’t seen a man so sickly and so tired-looking since, well. Since he’d gotten home from Vietnam and faced himself in a mirror for the first time in a while. That’s why he worries in such a way that Flo can’t grasp. There’s things sleeplessness can do to a person. Burgie can still feel the slickness of arterial blood on his hands, the twist of his buddy’s body as he’d tried madly to shy away from the medic, the tourniquet, the syringe of benzodiazepine. 

It’s just not natural. The door swings open under his hand, unlocked.

Beyond the doorway, the room is silent, and still. The net curtains are the only things which move; shifting gently in the breeze the open windows allow through. For Burgie, being inside the house always creates a kind of double-image. One in which his eyes seek out the differences in without having to make the decision to. The phonebook is open on the coffee table, next to an empty glass that must’ve held whiskey, judging by the dead ladybird curled up in the stickiness at the bottom. Dishes in the sink, fruit flies rising from them as Burgie steps into the room, and lets the screen door slam. 

The sound seems to bounce off the walls. Eerie, in its echoing. Burgie never even knew this house was big enough to hold an echo. 

“Gene,” he calls out, as he steps further into the room, heart shifting nervously under his breastbone. Stale air, old cigarette smoke, the smell of the dishes in the sink. Eugene’s never been the sort to be untidy. That alone is enough to have Burgie tearing through to that narrow hallway that tethers the front room to the bedroom, sweat springing up on his brow from the surprising heat inside the house. As if all the sticky warmth that has been ebbing from the air has been getting gathered up down here, the house like tacky flypaper for the elements. 

Nobody answers him. No faint sound of movement, no voice yelling croakily back like last time. Eugene, those huge brown eyes of his looking even bigger in his thin face, with the shock of seeing Burgie in his doorway. Just to make sure, Burgie checks the bathroom, rattles the shower curtain back on its rail to blink into the empty tub. In the mirror above the sink, his reflection looks flushed, and spooked. Eyes wide, face white, two hectic spots of red high on his cheeks. _What are you doing?_ he asks the man in the mirror. The stranger doesn’t reply, only blinks. 

The door to the bedroom is closed, but not completely. A thin bar of light trails across the floorboards, and falls on the opposite wall. Burgie steps into it, and imagines the light cutting him easily down the middle like cheese wire. The house has the sort of stillness Burgie could only compare to the grave. Black flies at mouths, at nostrils, at eyes. He’s seen his fair share of it. He knows it when it’s near. 

Burgie feels sick. Maybe Flo is right about that ulcer she thinks he’s getting. 

“Gene,” he says again, but softer. Lingering outside the closed bedroom door, heart so high up in his throat with nerves that Burgie feels like he could bite it, if he closed his teeth wrong. He lifts his hand to rap on the doorframe, the sound of his knocking seeming to echo back through the dim corridor. 

In Vietnam they’d been taught to see with their ears. To not trust their eyes as their only sense. To expand themselves out until using every single sense they had was like second-nature. In almost ten years, Burgie has never been able to shake that conditioning. He doesn’t like what his ears are telling him now. Silence has always been the enemy.

Burgie nudges the door open. Smells something spicy-sweet, musky, something familiar but Burgie can’t place it. Has no desire to, as his gaze swings around the room and his heart nudges so close to his uvula he feels he could gag on it. 

The window, curtains swaying in some invisible breeze. The typewriter, black and dusty and orphaned in a sea of balled-up paper and dirty mugs.

The bed, empty but for the twist of bedsheets.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading! i'm really excited to finally have this finished and able to post, i really love it...! lemme know what u think too :~)
> 
> for the trigger warning: snafu makes mention to self injuring (and has the scar to show for it) in an attempt to escape the war and its effects on him.


End file.
